Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Urban He was pressured to apologize after he posted a video of himself at a soccer match wearing a scarf depicting historic Hungary, including parts of Ukraine and neighboring countries.
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko said on Tuesday that Kyiv would summon Hungary’s ambassador, “who will be informed of the unacceptability of Viktor Orban’s action.”
The promotion of revisionist ideas in Hungary It does not contribute to the development of Ukrainian-Hungarian relations and does not adhere to the principles of European politics, ”Nikolenko wrote on Facebook. “We are waiting for an official apology from the Hungarian side and a refutation of the encroachments on the territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
Ukrainian media showed photos of Orban meeting a Hungarian footballer wearing a scarf which Ukrainska Pravda reported depicted a map of “Greater Hungary” including lands that are now part of neighboring countries such as Ukraine, Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia and Serbia.
The Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also reacted angrily, saying that it had given the Hungarian ambassador in Bucharest its “categorical refusal of this gesture”.
“Any manifestation of revisionism in whatever form is unacceptable against current realities and shared commitments,” it said in a statement on Monday.
In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Orbán did not directly address the scarf controversy. “Football is not politics. Don’t read things into it that don’t exist. The Hungarian national team belongs to all Hungarians, wherever they are!”
Orbán regularly raised disputes with neighboring countries by referring to Hungary’s territory before World War I.
The two countries have clashed repeatedly in recent years over what Hungary described as restrictions on the right of Hungarians living in Ukraine to use their mother tongue, particularly in education, after Ukraine passed a law in 2017 restricting the use of minority languages in schools.
About two million Hungarians live in neighboring countries, including 1.2 million in Romania and 150,000 in Ukraine.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse
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