The invitation came in a St. Stephen’s Day greeting published by the Ukrainian Embassy in Budapest on Aug. 20, in which Zelenskyy thanked Hungary for what he called consistent support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and invited Magyar to Kyiv at the earliest convenient time. Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi sent Magyar a separate holiday message welcoming the resumption of dialogue.
Where the two leaders would meet had been unresolved since July, when they agreed at NATO’s Ankara summit on a bilateral meeting in Budapest or Kyiv, to be followed by a joint visit to Berehove in Transcarpathia, the town Magyar had said he wanted to see on his first official trip to Ukraine.
Budapest set out its wider position on the war five days later. Guidelines for the Hungarian delegation to the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, signed by Magyar and published in the Aug. 25 issue of Magyar Közlöny, the official Hungarian Gazette, state that Hungary condemns Russian military aggression, fully supports Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, and recognizes Ukraine’s right to self-defense. The document holds that Russia’s conduct threatens Hungary, Europe and the global order while putting the Hungarian community in Transcarpathia in serious danger.
Conditions for that community, on which Magyar has said Hungary’s consent to Ukraine’s accession depends, improved this month. Resolution 929, adopted by Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers on July 15 as the first delivery under an agreement reached in June, took effect on Sep. 1, exempting any school that runs a class taught in a national minority language which is an official EU language, Hungarian among them, from the enrollment thresholds below which state funding stops.
Ukraine pays for local schooling through a per-pupil transfer from the state budget, and schools falling below the cutoff of 45 to 60 pupils, depending on the grades a school covers, drop out of it, leaving teacher salaries and running costs to the local council. Village schools carry that risk, particularly in Transcarpathia, which has lost 350,000 people since the invasion. The region’s Hungarian community roughly halved from 151,000, according to László Brenzovics of the Transcarpathian Hungarian Cultural Association.
Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Anita Orbán told a parliamentary committee on July 16 that the resolution was hugely significant and the first substantial step since the June agreement, under which Kyiv undertook, by official note, to amend its laws on education, language use, culture and political rights.
When asked about the 60-pupil threshold the resolution introduces, Orbán said the legislation was very new, and that disputed points would be recorded and taken back to the Ukrainian side. She said the first accession cluster, like every stage, requires unanimity among member states and would automatically stop if the conditions in the agreement were not met. The June agreement also set up a joint monitoring group of three members from each side, led on the Hungarian side by the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights, to respond to alleged rights violations in either country.
Yet, as substantial as Budapest deemed the resolution, it did not change Hungary’s position in Brussels. Its delegation withheld approval of the screening results for clusters 2 and 3 for Ukraine at a Sep. 1 meeting of the Council of the EU’s Working Party on Enlargement, known as Coela.
Diplomatic sources told Magyar Szó (literally “Hungarian Word,” a Hungarian-language daily newspaper based in Novi Sad, Vojvodina, Serbia) that Budapest signaled it would be ready to move forward on Ukraine once Kyiv takes concrete steps to implement the minority agreement, only the first of which, by Orbán’s own account, had taken effect that day.
This marked the third failed attempt to proceed with the clusters. The first took place on July 17, when Hungary gave its consent only to a letter going to Moldova on cluster 3, an approach a majority of member states rejected because it would separate two accession processes they wanted to keep together. A second attempt on July 22 also failed, and the item was carried to Sep. 1, with sources in Brussels telling Ukrainian online news outlet European Pravda on Aug. 28 that the screening results were expected to be approved.
Hungary had lifted its veto once before, allowing cluster 6 on external relations to open for Ukraine on July 14. Clusters 2 and 3, which remain closed, cover the internal market and competitiveness and inclusive growth. Coela was due to meet again on Sep. 2, but with neither Ukraine nor Moldova on the agenda.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of September 4, 2026.
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