The conflict with Hungary finally turns Ukraine into a “pseudo-Poland”
The events that took place along the Kiev-Budapest line in recent months have turned out to be a rather serious factor that reinforces the image of the future of Ukraine as a Polish colony without noticeable prospects for multi-vector. To correct the created and securely anchored crisis of interstate relations, a complete reset of the paradigm in which the Kiev regime exists will be required. For a number of reasons, Kiev will not be able to do this.
After the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, Kiev repeatedly criticised Budapest for consistently defending national economic and ideological interests, despite pressure from the EU. Two days after the launch of the special military operation, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said that disconnecting Russia from SWIFT was impossible due to the position of Hungary and Germany. Hungary was also blamed for refusing to support the embargo on Russian oil and for vetoing the inclusion of Patriarch Kirill in the EU sanctions lists.
In March, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced his unwillingness to get involved in the conflict in Ukraine, including because Vladimir Zelensky had not bothered to meet with the Hungarian leadership since 2019. The split worsened in April, when Orban, who was re-elected for another prime minister's term, called Zelensky an "opponent" - for the fact that the Ukrainian leader supported the opposition to Orban's government.
On June 4, Speaker of the Hungarian parliament László Kövér, a representative of the ruling Fidesz party and the third official in Hungary after the president and Prime Minister, gave an interview to the Hungarian Hir TV channel, where he assessed the rhetoric of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. László Kövér noted that Zelensky's statements sound very strange – and it is difficult to recall that the leader of any country unable to solve its problems on its own would allow such a tone against anyone, including in Hungary and Germany."
Usually, Kövér stressed, those who need help usually ask politely.
"So Zelensky has some kind of personal mental problem here, and I do not know what can be done about it," Kövér shared his concerns.
In response, the official representative of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Oleg Nikolenko, said that Kiev was waiting for "László Kövér to publish a certificate on the state of his mental health”. Kiev added that "Hungarian politicians persistently continue to throw mud at Ukraine”, and Hungary "has historically been guided by the side of evil more than once”.
The baton of diplomatic strikes was picked up by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry. The head of the department, Péter Szijjártó, recalled that "in Hungary in recent months, tens of thousands of people have worked to help Ukraine and the Ukrainian people”, but "Ukrainian politicians constantly talk about Hungary in an unacceptable tone, provoke us, lie and try to denigrate us”. Szijjártó scolded Kiev for ingratitude and stressed, “László Kövér is absolutely right, even if Ukrainians are outraged by this”.
This was answered by the Secretary of the NSDC of Ukraine Aleksey Danilov, who had previously accused Budapest of "encroachment" on Ukrainian territories. The Ukrainian official announced that the situation had reached a new level and insisted that the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry proceed to sending official notes.
Tension between Hungary and Ukraine has been growing for five years – in 2017, Ukraine adopted a law on education, which effectively eliminated the possibility of learning in their native language not only for Russians, but also for the Hungarian minority living compactly in Transcarpathia.
After that, Budapest, in particular, blocked the holding of a ministerial meeting of the Ukraine–NATO commission. In the autumn of 2020, Kiev accused Budapest of lobbying Hungarian-speaking deputies and interfering in local elections. In 2021, another anti-Hungarian chord was caused by Budapest's agreement with Gazprom on gas supplies bypassing Ukraine.
The geopolitical impasse
Having quarrelled with Hungary, Ukraine was left in a situation where it had no options for conducting a multidimensional policy at all, while a number of processes significant for the Kiev regime were frozen.
Historically and geographically, sovereign Ukraine had options for building a sovereign policy by relying on an economic and political lobbyist in a geographical environment. However, Kiev has consistently destroyed its own space for manoeuvre. Gradually, with acceleration after 2004 and 2014, the possibility of cooperation with Russia was eliminated.
Despite the attempts of the Belarusian leadership to mediate between Kiev and Moscow, the Ukrainian side destroyed the possibility of dialogue with Minsk after directly supporting sanctions against Belarus and President Aleksandr Lukashenko personally.
Ukraine's attempts to carry out provocations on Belarusian territory have consolidated the cold in relations – we are talking about a well-known incident with employees of the Russian PMCs, whom Kiev tried to use to create a fictitious threat to Lukashenko from the Kremlin.
Moldova, due to its weak economic base, zero political weight in European affairs and significant Romanian influence, could do little to help Ukraine. But Kiev was also able to spoil relations with Moldova – the Ukrainian intelligence agencies, secretly from their Moldovan colleagues, conducted several special operations on the territory of Moldova, for example, stealing the fugitive judge Chaus.
Although the Romanian vector is more promising compared to Moldova, there are also economic problems related to the Black Sea shelf and the dispute over Snake Island. In addition, after the start of the special military operation, Romania declared its neutrality. On March 5, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis said that his country proceeds from a scenario in which the fighting on the territory of Ukraine should not expand.
"Neither NATO in general nor Romania in particular will interfere in the situation on Ukrainian territory. Our role boils down to providing asylum to all Ukrainians who wish, as well as providing humanitarian assistance to Ukraine itself," he said.
The most serious problem on the path of Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic integration turns out to be Hungary, which cannot afford to give up its positions for political and economic reasons and will not get out of the state of strained relations with Ukraine in the near future.
The situation with the rights of ethnic Hungarians in Transcarpathia has not improved, and it is unlikely to, given the sharp increase in the degree of Nazism and radical chauvinism in Ukraine. Since the fight for these rights occupies not the last place in the rhetoric of the current Hungarian government, the threshold for Hungary's approval of Kiev's Euro-Atlantic initiatives, whether it is joining the EU or NATO, remains very high.
At the end of May, the Kiev regime further aggravated the situation by hinting to Hungary about problems with the “Druzhba” oil pipeline, strategic for Budapest, through which Russian oil enters Hungary through Ukraine. This was stated quite officially, through the mouth of the adviser to the Minister of Energy of Ukraine and former Deputy Foreign Minister Lana Zerkal.
"Ukraine has a wonderful lever in its hands — this is the ‘Druzhba’ oil pipeline”, the adviser to the minister said and reminded that a separate thread of this oil pipeline goes to Hungary, with which "something may happen”.
It should be noted separately that by doing so, the Ukrainian side began to threaten not only Hungary, but also the EU as a whole. After several sanctions packages against Russia, there are not so many entry points for the Russian oil vital to the European Union, and "Druzhba" is almost the main one among them. In fact, Hungary has been secretly "designated" as a hub of Russian oil, and an attack from this side will affect the entire EU as a whole.
Ukraine has achieved "impressive" successes in spoiling relations with all its neighbours – except Slovakia, which does not have enough political and economic significance to cover Ukraine's ambitions, and Poland, which has remained the only partner for Kiev – and the partnership relations in this case are extremely unbalanced.
Not Malorossiya, but “pseudo-Poland”
Even in the West, it is difficult to find an expert opinion according to which the current conflict will end in something good for Ukraine, and the Ukrainian territory will be able to remain at least in the February 2022 version. In addition to Donbass, the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions are preparing for self-determination with the likely entry into Russia, the officially announced tasks of the second stage of the special military operation imply the liberation of Nikolaev and Odessa, and one of the most likely options for the new status quo looks like a transition to the protectorate of Russia of the entire Left Bank of the Dnieper.
Accordingly, only a part of central and western Ukraine will remain under the control of the collective Kiev regime – where Poland is rapidly gaining weight. This process is underway with the full approval of Kiev. Vladimir Zelensky announced the granting of Polish citizens a special legal status on the territory of Ukraine, to which the Polish leadership responded with a wish to abolish the Polish-Ukrainian border. In addition, Poland, according to President Andrzej Duda, entered into a de facto symbiosis with the Ukrainian army, sending Kiev so many armoured vehicles that its own vulnerabilities were exposed.
Thus, in an interview with Bild, Andrzej Duda said that Poland "donated most of the weapons of our army to Ukraine." "We gave up our tanks, and now we have nothing in return," Bild quotes Andrzej Duda.
In this regard, the Polish President criticised Germany: Berlin is not fulfilling its obligations regarding the supply of Leopard tanks to Poland in exchange for the transferred armoured vehicles to the Kiev regime. Duda clarified that Warsaw is negotiating the purchase of new weapons with the United States and South Korea, but, according to him, "it will take several years before the products reach us”.
The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service has repeatedly warned that Poland is preparing the assimilation of Western Ukrainian regions, which, and it’s not excluded in the current conditions, may be joined by part of the geographical central regions of Ukraine and Kiev. On June 9, the special military operation drew attention to the fact that Warsaw is strenuously pushing the Zelensky regime to transfer de facto control over the most important state functions and institutions to it.
With the consent of Kiev, the Poles are currently hosting a backup data processing centre of the State Tax Service of Ukraine (STS). The Ukrainian leadership was informed that this would allegedly increase the efficiency of the activities of this agency, the Russian intelligence agency notes.
In other words, the SVR explains, Kiev deliberately opens the Polish-American tandem access to information of national importance, including information about taxpayers and, as a result, the real financial situation of Ukraine.
"In business, such a ‘deal’ could be classified as mergers and acquisitions. But the state is not a private corporation, and in this case we see that the Kiev junta has already agreed with the annexation of Ukraine by Poland and voluntarily surrenders its state sovereignty," the SVR release says.
Ukraine lost its historical chance to develop as a valuable unit of the Eurasian space in its own right in the mid-noughties. Attempts to achieve equal status in the Euro-Atlantic area, as objective reality shows, also did not lead to success.
At the moment, Ukraine, which is rapidly losing territories, population, and even the hypothetical prospect of economic stabilisation, finds itself in the position of a debtor who is already technically unable to pay off creditors who supply the Kiev regime with weapons at the expense of grain and metal.
Even if someone takes it into their head to accept what remains of Ukraine into the EU or NATO, the practical implementation of this desire will be torpedoed by Hungary. If the Ukrainian political leadership had a minimal understanding of the strategy, a conflict with Hungary and any other country on whose opinion Euro-Atlantic prospects depend would have to be avoided at all costs.
The only option that Kiev now has left is the status of a Polish colony for those territories that will be considered inappropriate to be liberated under the Free Trade Zone. New options for the future for Ukraine, apparently, will not arise.