Kyiv demands apology after Prime Minister Orbán wears headscarf showing parts of Ukraine as Hungarian | Hungary

Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban was pressured to apologize after posting a video of himself at a football match wearing a scarf representing historic Hungary, including parts of Ukraine and neighboring countries.

Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko said on Tuesday that Kyiv would summon the Hungarian ambassador “who will be informed of the unacceptability of Viktor Orbán’s act”.

“The promotion of revisionist ideas in Hungary does not contribute to the development of Ukrainian-Hungarian relations and does not respect the principles of European politics,” Nikolenko wrote on Facebook. “We expect an official apology from the Hungarian side and a refutation of attacks on the territorial integrity of Ukraine.”

Ukrainian media showed footage of Orbán meeting a Hungarian footballer wear a scarf whose outlet Ukrainska Pravda reported a map of “Greater Hungary” comprising territory that is now part of the neighboring states of Ukraine, Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Croatia and Serbia.

The Romanian Foreign Ministry also responded angrily, saying it had submitted to the Hungarian ambassador in Bucharest its “strong disapproval of the gesture.

“Any revisionist demonstration, whatever its form, is unacceptable, against current realities and common commitments,” he said in a statement on Monday.

In a Facebook post Tuesday, Orbán did not directly address the headscarf controversy. “Football is not politics. Don’t read things into it that aren’t there,” he wrote. “The Hungarian national team belongs to all Hungarians, wherever they live !”

Orbán regularly caused controversy with neighboring countries by referring to Hungarian territory before World War I.

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

About two million ethnic Hungarians live in neighboring countries, including 1.2 million in Romania and 150,000 in Ukraine.

With Reuters and Agence France-Presse