Does Hungary Covet Ukrainian Territory?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

When people worry about Hungarian irridentism – the desire to incorporate ethnic Hungarians living in countries adjoining present-day Hungary into the country – they usually think of Hungarian minorities in Serbia, Slovakia, and especially Romania.

These countries contain large Hungarian populations, who have long lived in these regions, because they were for centuries part of a much larger Hungarian kingdom.

Hungary lost nearly two-thirds of its territory after the First World War and some Hungarians still wish to regain some of it. The current nationalist Hungarian government of Prime Minister Victor Orban has made no secret of its desire to, at the least, provide protection to these minorities.

One country that rarely comes up in these discussions is Ukraine, but there too a small area in the far west of the country, Zakarpattia Oblast, has a Hungarian population of about 156,000. This is historically known as Transcarpathian Ruthenia, a poor, mostly rural area on the western side of the Carpathian Mountains.

In the area along the Ukrainian border with Hungary, in the Tisza River valley, Hungarians form the majority. Does Hungary covet them?

Last November, Orban went to a soccer match wearing a scarf depicting some Ukrainian territory as part of Hungary. Ukrainian media showed images of Orban meeting a Hungarian player while wearing a scarf which the outlet Ukrainska Pravda said depicted a map of “Greater Hungary,” including territory now part of the neighbouring states of Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Serbia and Ukraine.

“The promotion of revisionism ideas in Hungary does not contribute to the development of Ukrainian-Hungarian relations and does not comply with the principles of European policy,” stated Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko. He demanded a rejection of any Hungarian claims on Ukrainian territory.

Orban did not directly address the controversy over the scarf. “Soccer is not politics. Do not read things into it that are not there,” he replied. “The Hungarian national team belongs to all Hungarians, wherever they live!”

Earlier that month, there had been another tense moment. On Nov. 11, Polish Independence Day, Laszlo Toroczkai, president of the Hungarian far right Mi Hazank (Our Homeland) Movement, posted a note on Twitter calling for a “common Polish-Hungarian border.”

He attached a 1939 photo showing a Polish and a Hungarian soldier shaking hands at the then Polish-Hungarian boundary at Verecke Pass. Today, the area belongs to Ukraine, and is one of the most important passes of the inner eastern Carpathian Mountains. Nikolenko issued a statement calling on the Hungarian government to condemn the desire to revise state borders.

The two countries have repeatedly clashed in recent years over what Hungary has contended are curbs on the right of ethnic Hungarians living in Ukraine to use their native tongue, especially in education, after Ukraine passed a law in 2017 restricting the use of minority languages in schools.

Orban, a proponent of “illiberal democracy,” cultivates his own brand of revanchist nationalism, and has even raised suspicion that he might one day attempt to reclaim Hungarian lands in Ukraine.

But the Ukrainians are also not blameless. About 40 per cent of Ukrainians consider Hungary to be an “enemy nation,” according to a survey conducted by the Ukrainian polling company Rating last October.

That same month, officials in Mukachevo, a half-hour drive from the Hungarian border and known as Munkacs in Hungarian, dismantled a large statue of a turul, a falcon-like bird from Hungarian mythology. This certainly ruffled some feathers in Budapest.

Hungarian Secretary of State for National Policy Janos Arpad Potapi said it was regrettable that “in the midst of war, the city’s leadership finds it as their priority task to tear down a monument that is a symbol of local and Transcarpathian Hungarian identity.”

Tensions between Budapest and Kyiv, which share a 137-kilometre border, have certainly intensified since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Orban’s relatively friendly relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin has not gone unnoticed.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Orban have clashed publicly, with Zelensky accusing the Hungarian of callous indifference to the suffering of Ukrainians.  

In March 2022, one month into the war, tensions burst into the open when Zelensky scolded Orban for his refusal to impose sanctions against Moscow while Russia bombarded Mariupol. In Hungarian elections held a month later, Orban cited Zelensky as an “opponent,” along with “Brussels bureaucrats.”

Why this stance? When Russia invaded Ukraine, Orban was presented with two choices: to walk a tightrope between Western and Eastern interests or stand with Europe in its support for Ukraine. He chose the former and has spent the past year criticizing the European Union’s role in the war whilst calling for “peace.”

Hungary depends on cheap Russian oil and gas, which in turn allows Orban to keep energy prices low and win votes. “We will keep our economic relations with Russia, and this is what we propose to our allies as well,” Orban stated during an address in Budapest on Feb. 18.

Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjarto, who has previously complained that Ukrainian “hatred against Hungarians continues to be incited at the central government level,” was the only EU foreign minister missing from a video the other ministers made Feb. 20 in Brussels in support of Ukraine.

 

Russia’s Ally Belarus Draws Closer to Iran

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Belarus recently made news when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Moscow would store nuclear weapons in the country. The country is ethnically, religiously and linguistically Russia’s closest ally. They have close military relations.

 Russian is also an official language in Belarus and widely spoken, including by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. Indeed, the literal translation of the word Belarus is White Russia.

 Heavily dependent on Moscow for money, fuel and security assistance, all vital to his own survival after 28 years in power, Lukashenko is widely believed to be under growing Russian pressure to get more involved in the Ukraine war.

Last October, during a visit to Russia, Lukashenko announced the formation of what he called a “joint regional group of troops” to counter “possible aggression against our country” by NATO and Ukraine. He accused Ukraine, which shares a long border with Belarus, of planning attacks from the south, without citing evidence.

Ihor Kyzym, the ambassador of Ukraine to Minsk, was summoned to the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs where he was handed a note stating that Ukraine was allegedly planning an attack on the territory of Belarus. As a result, Ukraine announced that it was building a reinforced concrete wall and other fortifications on its border with Belarus, which is more than 1,000 kilometres long.

Meanwhile, Putin has been forced to embrace Iran because he finds himself totally isolated on the global stage following the invasion of Ukraine. The countries that have so far remained loyal to Moscow – Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, and Syria -- can hardly be said to uphold the principles of democratic rule.

Though the regime in Tehran is beset by a protest movement that it hasn’t been able to completely suppress, it is supplying Moscow with drones and the personnel to train its forces to use them.

Iran’s theocratic establishment is rushing to cross the nuclear threshold in order to become a nuclear-armed state. Iran wants Russia to help it speed up its nuclear program. Russia and Iran previously worked together to construct several nuclear reactors in Iran and advance the regime’s nuclear technology.

The closer ties between Russia and Iran have also had an effect on Belarus. Iran and Belarus have been increasingly brought together over their alliance with Russia amid the war in Ukraine.

Lukashenko travelled to Tehran in mid-March, the first such visit in 17 years, and met with his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi. Lukashenko also met with Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and Foreign Minister Sergei Aleinik held talks with his Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

Thirty years after the start of relations “the two countries have the will to strengthen cooperation,” Raisi stated, praising their “common strategic vision.”

The two countries pledged to bolster bilateral cooperation, particularly in industry, agriculture, transportation, and technology. They also discussed using the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Eurasian Economic Union to boost their economic ties, Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

Iran and Belarus signed a “road map of comprehensive cooperation” that will last until 2026. It mentions cooperation regarding politics, consular matter, science, technology, education and tourism, among other fields. Lukashenko and Raisi first discussed the plan in 2021. Lukashenko invited Iran to set up joint high-tech manufacturing facilities during a meeting with Iranian Vice President Mohammad Mokhber. 

The two states have both suffered relative international isolation. While Belarus has not sent troops to Ukraine, it did allow Russia to use its territory to invade the country last year, which led to American and European Union sanctions. 

Iran has long been sanctioned by the United States over its nuclear energy program and is facing increased international scrutiny for its recent violent crackdowns against domestic protests and for its support for Russia. This too has led to international criticism and sanctions from the United States and Europe.

Raisi promised Lukashenko during their meeting that the Islamic Republic can help Belarus mitigate the effects of sanctions. 

Global South Remains Aloof From Ukraine War

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Western responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine are widely seen as a sign of a reinvigorated alliance of democracies against authoritarianism. But in truth, it is really aimed at containing a state that has challenged the status quo and balance of power in Europe.

That poses a direct threat to the interests of the United States, Germany, France, Poland, and the other members of the NATO alliance as well as some of its leading partners in East Asia, such as Japan and South Korea, which rely on the United States to contain the influence of China, another potential challenger to the status quo.

But there has been little consideration of how the Russo-Ukrainian War will change the larger world order. Russia’s invasion doesn’t pose an immediate threat to the long list of nation-states that, while they may otherwise have very little in common, have made a cost-benefit calculation which has led them to conclude that the costs of joining the United States and its allies in a global military-economic campaign against Russia actually outweigh the benefits they could derive from such a policy.

The ongoing Ukraine war has in fact exposed the waning influence of the United States in the vast arc of the world known as the Global South, stretching from Latin America and Africa to South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.

Most Global South states, while opposed to the Russian invasion, have not backed the United States on its strategies of sanctioning Russia or seeking a defeat of Moscow. Some have explicitly criticized what they see as Washington’s double standards. Despite the region’s great diversity and heterogeneity, a new nonalignment is emerging in the Global South.

In general, these states wish to leverage their international relationships for their own benefit and not take sides in or support a new cold war between the great powers. Most are unconvinced or alienated by Washington’s rhetoric of “democracy versus autocracy” and the “rules-based international order.”

“That’s not an argument that serious people buy,” stated Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary in February, citing the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, U.S. support for dictatorships during the Cold War, and the Iraq War of 2003 as examples of the U.S. violating those same principles.

Attitudes towards the war in Ukraine are complex and varied in the Global South. NATO’s policies in Ukraine are reinforcing decades of wariness about the Western agenda. So instead of the inevitable global progress toward liberal democracy and market capitalism, democracies now struggle to find allies against autocratic regimes in China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

There’s been little support for sanctions, much less military aid, from the largest non-western countries, such as India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Brazil. Faced with social disorder and unreliable energy, these countries ignore the edicts of Western-defined “world opinion.”

This refusal to back the West goes back to the principle of nonalignment defined by India’s first Prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who, back in 1957, stated that it was “the natural consequence of an independent nation functioning according to its own rights. After all alignment means being regimented to do something you do not like and thereby giving up certain measures of independent judgement and thinking.”

South Africa in February refused to cancel its naval exercises with Russia and China. This came after Minister of International Relations Naledi Pandor last August accused the West of sometimes taking a patronizing and bullying attitude toward Africa, while she hosted U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. She declared neutrality towards the war and made it clear that South Africa has different views from the U.S. on Ukraine.

South Africa also has not condemned Russia for its annexation of Ukrainian territory. The country is a member of the BRICS bloc, which includes Russia, Brazil, India, and China; the organization plans to eventually incorporate more autocratic countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo last June paid a state visit to Russia in part to plead for peace but also to assure the restoration of the global food supply. Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador has condemned NATO’s strategy in Ukraine as “immoral.” Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has criticized the West’s massive military aid to Ukraine and said he would not visit either Russia or Ukraine while the conflict continued.

These nations prefer a multipolar world, with Russia as an independent pole, to give them geostrategic options. In their struggle to develop, they also increasingly see China, not the West, as the key development model. Beijing has already began exporting its economic success story to the rest of the world, without caring much about democracy.

Rather than cut ties with Moscow over the Ukraine invasion, China has increased trade with Russia. Beijing also recently helped re-establish diplomatic ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia, both leading oil exporters.

The West’s penchant for moralizing makes a future world economy centred around China appear increasingly appealing. The Chinese make deals without lectures on the environment and autocracy.

The developing world’s ability to resist autocracy depends on economic growth. The failures of the West to boost the economies of developing countries may be one cause for the global waning of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism.