Hungary claims OSCE agreed to Zakarpattia monitoring mission

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on
March 10 that the OSCE confirmed with him that it has launched an observation
mission in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia region in response to ethnic Hungarians
calling for protection against recent alleged ethnically motivated attacks. In
a statement released by his Fidesz party, Szijjarto claimed that the OSCE
leadership positively responded to requests for an OSCE special monitoring
mission made by the Hungarian Cultural Association of Zakarpattia following two
attacks on its property involving explosives. Szijjarto also claimed that the
OSCE confirmed in a letter to him that a permanent mission has been established
in Zakarpattia.

The OSCE is monitoring the situation in the
Zakarpattia region from its office in the Ivano-Frankivsk region and has
bolstered its presence following the attacks, the organization said on March 11
in response to questions posed by the pravda.com.ua news site. At the same time,
the Zakarpattia regional administration didn’t receive any proposals for an
OSCE permanent monitoring mission, spokesman Yaroslav Halas said the same day
as Szijjarto’s statement. It’s possible that the administration’s agreement
isn’t necessary, he said, but it should have been informed, at minimum. 

Earlier that week, Zakarpattia Regional Administration
Head Hennadiy Moskal blamed the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) on
organizing the attacks on the Hungarian cultural center. The claims were confirmed
by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin, who spoke against an OSCE
monitoring mission in Zakarpattia.

Zenon Zawada: As we’ve said before, the
Hungarian government is playing with fire in manipulating ethnic tensions in
the Zakarpattia region, this time even piggybacking off Russian sabotage
efforts, as alleged by Ukrainian state officials. If they are not cooperating
directly with the Russians, as we had initially suspected,
then the Hungarians are certainly playing into their hands. Part of Russia’s
hybrid war to dissolve the Ukrainian state is to exacerbate ethnic and
linguistic tensions in the country. Hungary is also doing the Kremlin’s
bidding, whether intentionally or not, in vowing to oppose Ukraine’s
Euro-Atlantic integration efforts. For the second time, it blocked a NATO
ministers meeting in February.

The conventional wisdom
is that the Hungarian government has been manipulating these ethnic tensions to
boost its poll ratings ahead of the parliamentary elections to be held on April
8. If this strategy fails, it will have left behind a lot of damage to
Euro-Atlantic unity amid Russian military aggression. Given that the Hungarians
are essentially aiding the Russians in destabilizing the situation in Ukraine,
and given that they are using similar tactics (embellishing the fact of an
enhanced OSCE presence to allege a permanent mission), we’ll be observing the
government’s actions after the elections for any indications that there could
indeed be cooperation with the Kremlin.

It’s also worth considering that the Ukrainian government
has developed a nasty habit of alleging its political enemies, and inconvenient
political events, to have roots with “the Russians.” So we’ll also be observing
on whether evidence surfaces that these attacks were truly orchestrated by the
FSB.