Uzhhorod, Ukraine – The Zakarpattia region, known for its ski resorts and undulating landscapes, has in recent years become an unlikely focal point of a diplomatic dispute between Budapest and Kyiv.Home to more than 100,000 ethnic Hungarians, Zakarpattia has a complex history of shifting borders and empires, having passed through Austro-Hungarian, Czechoslovak and Soviet rule before becoming part of independent Ukraine.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listLocated in the country’s southwest, the region’s administrative centre Uzhhorod has been largely unscathed from Russian attacks.The area borders Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, and is viewed by Kyiv as a stable and strategically vital borderland.Budapest, however, argues that the Hungarian minority’s language and education rights are under threat. The long-running disagreement has been a recurring obstacle to Ukraine’s EU relations during wartime.A dispute shaped by law, politics and warHungary’s objections were initially anchored in genuine minority-rights concerns, particularly between 2014 and 2019, as Ukraine moved to strengthen the use of Ukrainian as the state language following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Dr Krisztina Lajosi-Moore, a senior lecturer and research coordinator in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, told Al Jazeera.She said that tensions grew in 2017, when Kyiv passed an education law making Ukrainian the main language of instruction after primary school, significantly reducing the role of minority languages – including Hungarian – and prompting protests from Budapest and criticism from the Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe. Advertisement From a minority-rights perspective, Lajosi-Moore said the laws created both “tangible and symbolic anxieties”, particularly in education, and that Kyiv was slow to recognise how deeply these concerns were felt.While Ukra …
