Lavrov, the longtime Kremlin top diplomat, praised Hungary for a \u201cpragmatic course\u201d despite \u201cconstant pressure from NATO and the EU.\u201d<\/p>\n
He regurgitated the Kremlin\u2019s unsubstantiated grievance that Kyiv has declared war on \u201cthe Russian language and culture,\u201d leading to discrimination against Russian minorities in the country. That \u201cforced Ukrainization,\u201d in Lavrov\u2019s telling, should also be of concern to minorities such as Hungarians, Armenians, Belarusians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Poles and Romanians, he said, in a nudge to Budapest.<\/p>\n
According to the last official census\u00a0conducted in Ukraine in 2001<\/a>, there were about 150,000 Hungarians living in Ukraine, mainly concentrated along the Hungarian-Ukrainian border, but since 2022 that number has shrunk to less than\u00a090,000,\u00a0according to\u00a0recent estimates<\/a>.<\/p>\n Orb\u00e1n has recently ramped up his anti-Ukrainian campaign \u2014 including the vow<\/a> to block Kyiv\u2019s bid for EU membership \u2014 in a bid to unite his disparate voter coalition as he faces increasing pressure from opposition leader P\u00e9ter Magyar, whose Tisza party has a stable lead in opinion surveys, according to POLITICO\u2019s\u00a0Poll of Polls<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lavrov, the longtime Kremlin top diplomat, praised Hungary for a \u201cpragmatic course\u201d despite \u201cconstant pressure from NATO and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[5293,2000,299,41727,2190,332,10243,657,1781,333,335],"class_list":{"0":"post-245936","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-diplomacy","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-hungarian-politics","12":"tag-hungary","13":"tag-russia","14":"tag-sergey-lavrov","15":"tag-ukraine","16":"tag-viktor-orban","17":"tag-vladimir-putin","18":"tag-war-in-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114813394277655124","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}