The change of power in Budapest ended an almost decade-long cold war with Kyiv: a 90 billion euro loan was unfrozen, the seized money and gold belonging to Oschadbank were returned, and the first cluster of negotiations on Ukraine’s European Union membership was opened. Behind the facade of this reset, however, lies a less visible shift. Peter Magyar did not abolish the Hungarian brake. He moved it from public politics into the enlargement procedure itself by embedding the agreement on minority rights into the negotiating framework. Orban’s old veto was an enemy convenient to name. The new mechanism is a gatekeeper that cannot be bypassed and can hardly be blamed for anything.
Viktor Orban held Ukraine’s European integration hostage for ten years: vetoes, portraits of Volodymyr Zelensky with the caption “Danger!” on the streets of Hungarian cities, and detained armored cash transport vehicles belonging to a Ukrainian state bank. In three weeks, Peter Magyar did what his predecessor had failed to achieve in a decade, and presented it as a breakthrough. The paradox is that the breakthrough turned out to be a trap in attractive packaging. The wall Orban had built for years did indeed collapse on April 12. In its place stood a turnstile, and the key to it remained in Budapest.
The rise of the Tisza party gave Kyiv a chance to reset relations with Hungary after nearly a decade of open hostility. In two months, some things really did change for the better. The only question is whether both capitals will use this window, and, more importantly, whether they truly want to. Judging by the first steps of the new Hungarian cabinet, the answer is far more cautious than the enthusiasm voiced by Brussels commentators in June.
An Undeclared Cold War
As recently as spring, relations between Kyiv and Budapest looked almost purely destructive. Hungary’s long-serving leader turned Ukraine, and Zelensky personally, into the central theme of his campaign for the April 12 parliamentary election. Government propaganda, already hostile to Kyiv, spread anti-Ukrainian messages through every possible channel. Ukraine was accused of trying to drag Hungary into the war, driving up prices and utility rates, and threatening Hungarian independence. On the streets of Hungarian villages, there were noticeably more portraits of Zelensky with slogans such as “We will not let him laugh last” than images of Orban himself.
The war of words was only the tip of the iceberg. Orban’s Hungary blocked the allocation of a 90 billion euro European loan to Ukraine, money critically important for the financial stability of a country at war. Brussels had exempted Budapest from participation in the loan through a special decision, so the Hungarian veto was a matter of pure principle, not money. The Hungarian leader publicly promised not to allow even the formal, purely procedural opening of talks on Ukraine’s accession to the European Union, and blocked that decision for more than a year.
Just weeks before the vote, Budapest escalated again. Hungarian security forces demonstratively detained Oschadbank cash transport vehicles on Hungarian territory and confiscated their cargo, a large amount of foreign currency and gold bars. Zelensky called it state-level banditry. Earlier, the Ukrainian president had not spared harsh language for Orban, once hinting that Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers might visit the Hungarian prime minister at home.
Kyiv responded not only with words. Well-informed sources cited by Western media suggested that the repair schedule for the Druzhba oil pipeline, damaged by Russian drones and used by Hungary to receive Russian fuel, may have been arranged so that the pipeline would not resume operations before Hungary’s election day. The logic of the maneuver was transparent: to deny Orban the chance to play the Druzhba card at the height of the campaign. The Ukrainian issue became so toxic in Hungary’s information space that Orban’s main rival, Tisza opposition leader Peter Magyar, preferred to avoid it entirely in his campaign rhetoric.
Ukrainian polling registered a mirror process. More and more Ukrainians saw Budapest as an unfriendly neighbor, or even as Moscow’s Trojan horse inside the European Union. By the spring of 2026, bilateral relations looked like a dead end with no visible exit as long as the old Hungarian government remained in power.
Orban Fell and Kyiv Exhaled
The April 12 election turned into a crushing defeat for Fidesz. Magyar’s party won a constitutional majority, with final results showing more than 140 seats out of 199 and 53.6 percent of the vote, while Fidesz and its allies fell back to 55 seats and 37.8 percent. Orban’s sixteen-year era ended in a single evening. The long-serving prime minister admitted defeat on election night and congratulated his opponent. For the first time since 2006, the outgoing leader found himself in the unfamiliar role of loser.
On May 9, Magyar officially took over as head of government: parliament approved him by 140 votes to 54, with one abstention. By that point, some of the sharpest conflicts between Budapest and Kyiv had already been defused, and largely through the efforts of the outgoing Orban cabinet, which was rushing to close toxic files before leaving office.
The thaw began rapidly. A week and a half after the election, Kyiv reported the repair of the damaged section of the Druzhba pipeline. As soon as Russian oil began flowing through it again, the Hungarian government unblocked the decision on the European loan to Ukraine. Oil flows were restored by the end of April. On May 6, Zelensky announced that Hungary had returned the money and gold seized from Oschadbank in March.
Four days after Magyar took office, Hungary’s new foreign minister, Anita Orban, summoned the Russian ambassador over a massive airstrike on Ukraine, several of whose targets were located in the border region of Zakarpattia. The move was described as unprecedented: the previous government had never allowed itself such a gesture toward Moscow. On May 20, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha announced the start of bilateral expert consultations on the rights of national minorities. The machinery of relations, stuck for years on the handbrake, suddenly began to move.
The Zakarpattia Knot That Could Not Be Untied for Ten Years
The minority issue has traditionally been the most explosive in Ukrainian-Hungarian relations. Zakarpattia, part of which belonged to the Hungarian crown for centuries, is home to a compact Hungarian community. Estimates of its current size vary: a significant share of ethnic Hungarians left for Hungary after the start of the full-scale war. Budapest cites a figure of roughly 100,000 people. The real number currently living on Ukrainian territory, judging by migration trends, is probably considerably lower, but in any case the issue concerns tens of thousands.
Protecting the linguistic and cultural rights of ethnic kin is a priority for any Hungarian government, and there is a national consensus on this issue inside the country. On the Ukrainian side, after Crimea and Donbas, the authorities react extremely painfully to any cultural or informational influence exerted by neighboring states over Ukrainian citizens. The clash between these two logics produced the crisis.
The starting point was the 2017 version of the education law, which expanded the use of Ukrainian in schools and narrowed the scope for instruction in minority languages. Budapest criticized the law, and from that moment the major collapse in bilateral relations began. Although the law was never fully implemented in Hungarian schools in Zakarpattia, Orban’s propaganda spent years constructing an image of Ukraine as a state that banned Zakarpattian Hungarians from speaking their native language. Inside Hungary, this image became deeply rooted and turned into an electoral resource.
Orban presented Kyiv with a list of eleven minority-related demands as a condition for lifting his veto. He never managed to untie the knot. That is why Magyar’s statement in early June sounded so striking: his government, he said, had secured a “comprehensive agreement” guaranteeing the rights of the Hungarian community in Ukraine within a few weeks. “In three weeks, we achieved what Orban and his government could not achieve in ten years,” the new prime minister declared. The agreement, he added, made it possible to lift Hungary’s veto on opening the first of six clusters in Ukraine’s European Union accession talks.
A Historic Agreement or a Beautifully Packaged Veto
According to informed sources, the consultations covered three areas: education, the use of minority languages in the public life of regions, and the political rights of minorities. Judging by Magyar’s statement on social media, later effectively confirmed by Ukrainian officials, Kyiv agreed to introduce the status of “national minority school,” expand the use of minority languages not only in such schools but also at sporting, scientific, and other events, and allow their use during the electoral process. This was supplemented by the duplication of signs, plaques, and road signs in minority languages, as well as the use of minority symbols at official and state events.
Kyiv nevertheless refused to satisfy two serious demands from Budapest. Ukrainian legislation did not include the concept of “cultural autonomy,” a formula that is currently toxic in Ukraine and has no chance of being implemented. According to available information, the Hungarian side treated this with understanding. Kyiv also did not guarantee parliamentary representation for the Hungarian minority, since there is simply no place to implement such a requirement within Ukraine’s electoral system.
The results of these agreements are to be included in a government action plan on protecting minority rights, a list of measures Ukraine must adopt to comply with European Union standards. This approach has two far-reaching consequences, and both deserve close attention.
The first is that the rights Budapest negotiated for Zakarpattian Hungarians will automatically be extended to other minorities from European Union countries: Romanians, Poles, Bulgarians, and Slovaks. Hungary, in effect, acted as a locomotive for other people’s interests, even if it did not plan to.
The second consequence is more serious. A significant part of the agreements requires changes to Ukrainian law, and the consent of members of the Verkhovna Rada is not guaranteed. The ball moves to the field of the President’s Office and the Cabinet of Ministers. It will be their task to persuade parliamentarians to vote for new provisions, some of which will certainly provoke resistance in the middle of a war. Failure would create a direct vulnerability. If Ukraine fails to fulfill the obligations written into the plan, Hungary will obtain the legal right to block European integration, not on a contrived basis, but on formally impeccable grounds.
A Mechanism Built Into European Integration Itself
This is where the main change lies, the one missed by June’s enthusiastic headlines. Orban blocked Ukraine from outside the process through a personal veto, one that was always politically costly and highly visible. Magyar built the Hungarian lever into the enlargement mechanism itself. The bilateral agreement on minority rights has been integrated into the negotiating framework, and this changes the nature of Kyiv’s dependence on Budapest.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Anita Orban made the logic perfectly clear in Luxembourg: if Ukraine fails to comply with the agreement, progress on every cluster is automatically suspended. In other words, the Hungarian veto has not disappeared. It has been legalized, automated, and dissolved into the procedure in such a way that it now functions almost on its own, without public scandal.
Magyar has effectively preserved the right to block the opening of any cluster at any stage if he does not see progress on issues important to Hungary. The old brake was crude and loud. The new one is quiet, polite, and much more effective because it targets not Brussels’ political will but Kyiv’s ability to rewrite its own laws under external pressure and under fire.
On June 15, representatives of all 27 European Union countries officially opened the substantive phase of negotiations with Ukraine, the first cluster, “Fundamentals,” at an intergovernmental conference in Luxembourg. Magyar’s Hungary did not protest. Kyiv’s symbolic victory looked indisputable. Three days later, at the European Union summit on June 18, the reverse side became visible: at the insistence of the Hungarian prime minister, a passage about the possibility of Ukraine’s accelerated accession was removed from the final document. Magyar did not hide his authorship of the amendment and presented it as proof of his effectiveness: this, he implied, is how one should act, not by overturning tables or spreading fear, but by achieving compromise. Hungary became the only European Union country that did not sign the ambassadors’ procedural decision allowing an accelerated negotiating track for Ukraine and Moldova.
July Fourteenth as a Test of Sincerity
The latest turn came after the first wave of optimism had already faded, and it clarifies the situation more sharply than any declaration. On July 3, European Union countries agreed to open only one additional cluster, the sixth, “External Relations,” with a formal ceremony scheduled for July 14. This cluster is considered the least contentious of those remaining. After it is opened, two of the six clusters will be open, while four will remain closed.
Kyiv had hoped to open all six clusters at once in July. Magyar viewed that prospect skeptically, and his calculation proved more accurate. The Irish presidency of the Council of the European Union, which began on July 1, chose a gradual approach, one cluster at a time rather than a leap forward. Poland supports a similar logic, partly because of its own cooling relations with Kyiv: the dispute over naming a Ukrainian military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and President Karol Nawrocki’s decision to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle have poisoned the atmosphere between Warsaw and Kyiv. Hungary is no longer the only brake. It has acquired fellow travelers, and this gives Hungarian caution a respectable European cover.
Meanwhile, Magyar keeps reminding everyone that Budapest opposes Ukraine’s accelerated accession. Membership, he says, will be subject to a legally binding referendum in Hungary, and only after Kyiv closes all 33 negotiating chapters, which, according to the Hungarian prime minister, will take ten to fifteen years. The formula sounds almost mockingly soft: no outright “no,” only “yes, but not now and not quickly.” The July 14 vote will become part of the answer to the question of what is really in the new Hungarian leader’s mind, and the first signals point less to a reversal than to carefully measured dosing.
Why Magyar Has No Time for Kyiv Yet
There are several reasons for Hungary’s restraint, and all of them are rooted in Budapest’s domestic politics, not in its attitude toward Ukraine as such. Magyar, almost a newcomer by Hungarian standards, has been in power for less than two months and is still building his system of governance. It is premature to expect such a cabinet to have a coherent Ukraine strategy. Hungarian defense and security expert Tamas Csiki Varga, a senior consultant at SVSD Consulting, acknowledges that there is still no clear understanding of what exactly the government wants to achieve, while the relevant institutions, from the Foreign Ministry to the Defense Ministry, are still undergoing transformation.
Ukraine is hard to call a priority for the new cabinet for another reason as well. Magyar is absorbed by the domestic agenda, and this is not only about building a post-Orban power structure. On June 15, parliament introduced a constitutional amendment limiting a prime minister to two four-year terms in office. The rule applies retroactively, making Orban’s return legally impossible. In late June, an anti-corruption package with the telling name Operation Purgatory was submitted to parliament; some of its measures will also require amendments to the constitution. The new leader is busy dismantling his predecessor’s legacy, not building an eastern policy.
Public opinion is another factor. Magyar understands perfectly well that years of Orban-era propaganda have made Ukraine a toxic issue for Hungarian voters. Excessively sharp moves toward Kyiv would carry reputational risks for him, at least until a new information environment has been formed. Caution here is not a whim. It is insurance against domestic political punishment.
The Twenty Billion That Matter More Than Ukraine
In foreign policy, Magyar has one truly priority issue, and it is not Ukraine. It is the unfreezing of Brussels-blocked funding for Hungary, roughly 20 billion euros from European Union funds. Without this money, the country’s financial stability is cracking, while Tisza’s entire victorious rhetoric was built on the promise to “return Budapest to Europe” and return European money to Budapest.
Paradoxically, the same factor also works in Kyiv’s favor. To unblock and preserve European funding, Budapest will have to remain within the European mainstream on fundamental issues. Since that mainstream today requires the launch of Ukraine’s membership negotiations, Magyar, whether he wants to or not, is forced to play along with the relevant decisions, even if in minimal doses. Dependence on Brussels money disciplines the Hungarian prime minister more reliably than any persuasion. That is precisely why the Hungarian brake will most likely slow the process down rather than stop it altogether: a full blockade would cost Budapest too much.
Kyiv’s calculation here is sober and limited. Ukraine would be satisfied if relations with Hungary became strictly pragmatic and Budapest stopped acting as Moscow’s Trojan horse and blocking European integration on contrived grounds, as it did under Orban. Diachuk defines the current situation accurately: a transition from systemic confrontation to conditional pragmatism. Active hostility is in the past, normal partnership lies ahead and remains unreachable for now, while every step requires separate, carefully calibrated negotiations.
The Berehove Trap
The issue of a personal meeting between the leaders deserves separate analysis. Such a meeting could become a potential green light, giving the bureaucracies of both countries a signal to start operating differently. Effective talks between Magyar and Zelensky, both dominant figures in their respective political systems, could theoretically open a new chapter: restart sectoral working groups that did not meet for years under Orban and set the tone for restoring relations. Talk of such a meeting has been circulating in political circles for several weeks.
Magyar himself was the first to raise the issue. Even before formally taking office, he invited Zelensky to a meeting in early June in Berehove, in Zakarpattia, calling it a “city with a Hungarian majority”; Ukrainian interlocutors tend to consider that somewhat exaggerated. From the standpoint of diplomatic protocol, the proposal looked strange, to say the least: the leader of one state publicly named the time and place of a meeting for the leader of another state, and chose a location on that other state’s territory. Kyiv diplomatically made clear that the details of bilateral meetings are agreed through bilateral contacts, and full-fledged talks in June never materialized.
Magyar’s motive is transparent. In Berehove, the informal center of the Hungarian community, he would have looked advantageous against the backdrop of grateful ethnic kin for whom he had “extracted” from an unyielding Kyiv the right to their native language. The image value of such a scene for the new prime minister is obvious. Kyiv, however, insists that the first full-fledged meeting between the leaders of two European states implies a capital-level format, not a district center. On the sidelines of the June 18 European Union summit, the leaders limited themselves to a brief handshake, a photograph of which the Hungarian prime minister posted on social media. According to him, the meeting itself will happen sooner or later. The possible venues mentioned include Berehove, Kyiv, Lviv, Budapest, and Uzhhorod. As a neutral option, the Ukrainian side is also ready to consider a third country on the sidelines of an international forum.
However high the expectations for a leaders’ meeting may be, it cannot replace systematic work by professionals at lower levels. Education should be negotiated by education ministers; minority issues should be handled by the relevant agencies. Decisions are developed in negotiating rooms, not at microphones. Ukraine has already gone through this with Orban: after meetings between foreign ministers Peter Szijjarto and Dmytro Kuleba, each would come out to the press with his own, often opposite, version of what had been achieved. Repeating that scenario would return relations to the starting point. A beautiful handshake photo can create the illusion of a breakthrough where there is no substance, and that is precisely its danger.
The Polish Factor: Why Kyiv Needs Budapest at All
A natural question arises: why is Kyiv so interested in Hungary at all, given that relations with it had been a minefield for years? The answer lies in geopolitical arithmetic. Under Orban, the infrastructure of bilateral ties degraded. Intergovernmental working groups could go years without meeting, while Budapest, on political issues, followed Moscow’s line just enough to avoid a final rupture with Brussels. Kyiv has reasons, far removed from sentiment, to rebuild that infrastructure.
Ukraine is interested in transport and energy partnership with Hungary, and the more its relations deteriorate with its largest western neighbor, Poland, the more urgent this interest becomes. Warsaw, which for years served as Kyiv’s key logistical and military rear base, is drifting away: the dispute over the legacy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Volhynia tragedy, the mutual return of state honors, and the stripping of Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle have poisoned the atmosphere. Against this background, the Hungarian corridor into Europe is acquiring a strategic weight for Kyiv that it did not previously have. Diversifying routes in wartime is a matter of survival, not convenience.
Many potential areas of cooperation are being named: agriculture, the defense industry, construction, and sectors involved in rebuilding the damaged economy. All these projects, however, need political momentum from the very top of both state pyramids. For now, that momentum does not exist. There is only communication between two capitals that has been unfrozen but remains wary, with each side calculating its own benefit and in no hurry to trust the other.
The Enemy Was Replaced by a Gatekeeper
The result of two months is sobering in exactly the same measure that June was encouraging. Orban was a wall: deaf, loud, politically expensive to maintain, and therefore vulnerable. Magyar has become a turnstile: passage is possible, but the mechanism is in his hands, and he has the right to lock it every time Kyiv fails to fulfill obligations that require rewriting Ukrainian laws under external pressure and under missile strikes. The old veto was an enemy who could easily be named and conveniently blamed before Brussels. The new mechanism is a gatekeeper who cannot be publicly reproached and cannot be bypassed because he is built into the very architecture of European integration.
The reset that began to be discussed in the spring is only half real. The cold war is over, the loan has been unfrozen, Oschadbank’s gold has been returned, the first cluster has been opened, and the second will open on July 14. These are all genuine achievements for Kyiv. The price for them, however, is written in fine print: concessions on minorities, legally secured and subject to implementation under Hungarian control, have been written into the negotiating framework in a way that gives Budapest a permanent, legal, and almost uncontested lever of delay.
The dosage of one cluster instead of six, the referendum caveat, the horizon of ten to fifteen years, and Irish and Polish gradualism all add up to a single picture. What is happening between Kyiv and Budapest is not a fresh start. It is a managed, conditional de-escalation that benefits Magyar above all: it repairs his reputation in Brussels, unlocks 20 billion euros in frozen funds, and allows him to present himself to Hungarian voters as a pragmatist who “did” for his ethnic kin what the loud Orban had merely promised. Moscow is losing its loudest ally in the European Union, but the structural friction built in by the new Budapest continues to slow Ukraine’s European integration without leaving Russian fingerprints.
The real question, therefore, is not the one being asked in Brussels. The issue is not whether Kyiv and Budapest can start from a clean slate. The question is whether Kyiv has traded a noisy enemy for a quiet gatekeeper, one who is less visible, less odious, and therefore far more dangerous. A window of opportunity has opened. It only opens inward, and now it can be slammed shut with one movement of the hand, without ever leaving the procedure.