Hungarians in Trans-Carpathia: “Everyone is Afraid”

On Wednesday our Hungarian correspondent László posted about reports that Hungarian men in Trans-Carpathia (southwestern Ukraine, Zakarpattia Oblast) were being forcibly — even violently — conscripted into the army and sent off to fight the Russians at the most dangerous part of the front.

Below is a news report about the situation in Trans-Carpathia, from an edition of the “Híradó” program on MTVA, the Hungarian public broadcaster. Many thanks to László for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

00:00   Men in western Ukraine are being terrorized by increasingly brutal forced conscriptions.
00:05   According to reports, men who appear to be conscripts are being hunted down on the streets.
00:11   The police and recruiting officers mostly operate in highly frequented locations:
00:15   train stations, petrol stations, near shopping centres and markets, but they also go into homes.
00:20   In Trans-Carpathia alone, there are about 100 locations where raids go on every day.
00:25   Everyone who can, stays at home.
00:29   Soldiers and police in Ukraine pointed guns in the open street at a man
00:33   whom they wanted to conscript, but he resisted.
00:36   They finally kicked him in the leg and forcibly pushed him down.
00:41   Another middle-aged man was pushed against a wall in front of civilians,
00:44   detained and taken away from a market.
00:48   Scuffles are also common at shopping centres,
00:51   as the Ukrainian army identifies and takes away anyone it can, to serve as a soldier.
00:55   And in Trans-Carpathia, similar footage of forced conscription is common
01:01   because, according to our information, Kiev wants to recruit thousands of people there
01:05   to replace the losses of the Ukrainian army.
01:08   However, a large number of people have already been taken from Trans-Carpathia,
01:12   many of whom later died or were wounded at the front.
01:15   The 128th Mountain Brigade, which Kiev has always deployed
01:18   in the fiercest fighting, has also suffered huge losses.
01:22   Most Hungarians serve in this unit.
01:25   Several people gave interviews to the Pesti Srácok [media outlet],
01:28   but only anonymously, because they expect retaliation by the Ukrainian authorities
01:32   if it is revealed that they have spoken about the inhumane conditions.
01:35   People are being taken off buses, public transport,
01:39   [The enforcers] go into shops and workplaces and now
01:44   they even go into homes to look for conscripts.
01:50   According to locals, the policemen and soldiers who walk around
01:53   in groups and round up the men come from central Ukraine.
01:56   And their methods are getting more violent by the day:
01:59   there is literally a manhunt going on in Trans-Carpathia.
02:02   The Hungarians say that everyone is afraid and whoever can flee does so,
02:06   otherwise they will get the conscription letter and be taken away.
02:09   If you are under 60 but over 18, they write you an [unintelligible].
02:18   In the meantime, convoys are coming home carrying the fallen from the front.
02:22   In Trans-Carpathia, you are not allowed to speak about that either, and the Ukrainian authorities
02:26   do not even give precise information to the relatives of the victims.
02:29   Many people do not know when their father, husband or child will return home.
02:34   According to press reports, a few hundred metres from the Hungarian border,
02:38   hundreds of soldiers’ bodies are being stored by the Ukrainian authorities
02:42   in a specially designed refrigerated goods wagon.
02:45   The soldiers have been dead for more than a week, and in some cases for more than a month,
02:50   but their relatives have not yet been able to bury them.
02:53   Kiev totally controls the media:
02:56   there is only the central news, which reports
02:59   that ‘Ukraine is on the verge of victory,’ writes Mandiner.
03:02   The media outlet notes that there is not a day without a soldier’s funeral,
03:05   but the exact number of victims and the living conditions of those
03:09   who fight must not even be questioned.
03:12   While Hungarians and other nationalities are being dragged to the front en masse,
03:16   Kiev is not changing its minority policy one iota.
03:20   In addition to [changing] the language law and the education law,
03:24   the Hungarian minority has recently suffered a number of atrocities.
03:27   Teachers have been dismissed from their jobs just because they are Hungarian. Hungarian flags
03:31   have been taken down and the Turul statue at the Munkács castle has been knocked down.
03:34   The situation of the Hungarian minority is most difficult in the Munkács sub-region,
03:38   where the openly anti-Hungarian Baloha clan rules.
03:41   An expert from Matthias Corvinus College spoke about this on Kossuth Radio.
03:45   Attila Demkó said that Kiev is doing nothing to curb the local oligarchs,
03:50   while the European Union is turning its head away and closing its eyes,
03:54   as if everything is fine and there are no anti-Hungarian measures in Ukraine.
03:59   On the one hand, the EU does not place much emphasis on the rights of national minorities,
04:05   that is being treated as a secondary or tertiary issue.
04:09   And there is a war going on, which pushes all other
04:12   considerations into the background in most European countries,
04:17   so neither Poland, nor Germany, nor France will hold Ukraine
04:22   to account for its treatment of its national minorities.
04:26   Attila Demkó added that the EU has not even set out any serious
04:31   expectations for Ukraine to change its measures and laws against minorities.
 

26 thoughts on “Hungarians in Trans-Carpathia: “Everyone is Afraid”

  1. Just imagine the out-cry from the EUSSR and the rest of the western worlds MSM if this would have been their especially protected species of Africans or Muslims?

    Maybe one could make a Meme out of that?

  2. This is what the US and EU elites call ‘democracy’. This is the democracy and freedom they want to impose on the world.

  3. Well, that started my day off nicely. Too damn bad the international media will turn a blind eye.
    Baron, is there any way to send this to Tucker Carlson. He’s the only one I can imagine might have the …clout to talk about this. So glad I don’t live near the UK border…how long before there are “accidental” border incursions by these hunters? And then what?

    • No, I don’t have any channel of communication with Tucker. But maybe one of our readers does.

    • Tucker is another talking head
      No brain just money making machine
      Where is your mind that you don’t see that?

  4. America is still sending billions in dollars and weapons so are many NATO nations to fuel this war. If America or NATO Europe threated to cut off the follow of cash or arms they would have some kind of a peace process move forward .No one holds the Ukraine to account ,true.

  5. First: there is no “forcible” conscription. _All_ conscription is forcible, and _all_ adult men in Ukraine are currently subject to conscription. To presume that there is or should be some sort of exception for people of Hungarian descent is disingenuous and dishonest.

    Secon: as Michelle Malkin repeatedly pointed out, the WW2 internment of Japanese Americans was a completely rational policy justified by genuine risks. Given how overtly Orban has been rooting for the Russians to win, for the Ukrainian government to apply the rules more strictly with ethnic Hungarians is far more forgiving, and it is a completely rational response by the Ukrainian government to look with suspicion upon a possible fifth column – especially given that they have ALREADY suffered significant losses in the south and east in the early stages of the war due to treachery.

    If these Ukrainian citizens of Hungarian ancestry are upset with the resulting policies, they have several options:
    1) Make like the Japanese-Americans and go out of their way to demonstrate loyalty and courage alongside Ukrainian soldiers, just like the Ukrainian citizens of Russian ancestry are doing;
    2) Communicate in the strongest possible terms to Viktor Orban that his policies and rhetoric are resulting in explicit harm for ethnic Hungarians and he should change course;
    3) Move to Hungary.

    When Russia instituted forced mobilization, tens of thousands of young Russian men headed for the borders. When Ukraine instituted forced mobilization, tens of thousands of Ukrainian men overseas headed back to Ukraine. And these Hungarians sat right where they were.

    That tells you exactly how seriously to take this report.

    • (1) Conscription is “forcible”, but there is a major difference between giving a citizen notice to report at a certain time and place and pursing police action against that citizen if he fails to report to military service, versus the government grabbing someone off the street.

      (2) Korematsu v. United States was one of the worst US Supreme Court decisions, and that view is held not only by liberals but also by the late conservative justices Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

      (3) The question to consider, I think, is, “Is conscription being done fairly?” Sometimes it is, sometimes its not. WWII conscription in the US appears to have been fair. Whites and blacks were drafted. Men from poor families to those from upper class families (such as President George H. W. Bush) were drafted. But unfair conscription is possible. An example of this comes from The Old Testament (2 Samuel 12:7–14). To summarize the Biblical story, King David had the hots for Bathsheba, a married woman. King David sent Bathsheba’s husband to the front lines in battle, so that he would be killed, which he was. The prophet Nathan reprimanded King David for it. So it is not at all farfetched to think that a state might arrange a certain class of citizens to bear the brunt of a war, especially if they are from another ethnic group.

    • Move to Hungary?! –huh! The borders are closed you [epithet]. And again some lame response to outright tyranny. Appeal to Victor Orban? Yeah–write those letters as you are huddled in a Ukrainian trench being shelled. [insults redacted]

    • When Ukraine instituted forced mobilization quite a lot of Ukrainian millions of Ukrainian men tried to flee the country. But most of them were stopped at the border. Only those who had enough money to bribe the border guards managed to escape. At present thousands of Ukrainian men are hiding from conscription inside the country.

      Russia, on the contrary, has allowed great numbers of draft-dodgers to leave the country and to earn their living by making anti-Russian propaganda from abroad.

      As for Hungarians, in modern Ukraine they are second-class citizens suffering from discrimination and from violence by ultra-nationalist thugs.

      Ukraine’s official ideology is not “democracy”, it is rabid ultranationalism complete with persecution and humiliation of ethnic and linguistic minoiries.

    • Because they consider themselves Hungarian, not Ukrainian, maybe Hungary should invade the Hungarian areas and take them back?

  6. Why does Russia not use this information?
    You know, finding out where those men are sent and instead of blowing them to pieces offering them to “capturing” them and then sent them to a nice city or offering to sent them to Switzerland for internment so that Selenski can no longer use them.

    • I think the Elensky regime uses the equivalent of political commissars/nazi enforcers to prevent any kind of desertion.

      Also, from a military perspective it is probably more effective to just kill all the Ukrainian soldiers with their artillery instead of trying to capture them. The demoralizing aspect of seeing everyone in your unit picked off one by one with long range artillery while there’s nothing to even shoot at cannot be underestimated.

      Anyway, Artyomovsk is almost completely surrounded by Russian forces, and cutting the last road into the city will eventually result in the bagging of tens of thousands of POWs. Hopefully many of those Hungarians and other ethnic minorities will be among them and will eventually be reunited with their loved ones.

      • The Ukies are bleeding the Russians white, and in typical Russian fashion, they are sending more bodies to get chewed up until either the Ukies run out of men or they sue for peace. It’s a numbers game of attrition.

  7. As this fiasco progresses, the US will see conscriptions as well. It will be most interesting to see if they are based on “gender assigned at birth” or gender preference – and how many trans-males decide it was not a good idea.

    • Probably will be a draft–that is if there are no nuclear hit on the USA. And that most assuredly would happen. But lets say there was a draft–what would be the result. Answer: you would see a ten million man mad dash to the Mexican border by all the millennial, latte-swilling leftists in the heavily blue controlled mega-cities. The Mexican government would most likely close the border as the influx would be so great. And do you think young conservative men would allow themselves to go to Europe and die by the masses for Biden and Zelensky? Fat chance. But some egg-headed, flag-waving militard’s would sign up–although nothing like we saw in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. If the USA goes to war with Russia, it would instantly turn into a nuclear conflict and be over within 48 hours. If you think it will be like WWII and the USA having time to mobilize and gear-up industry into a war machine–you are deluding yourselves.

      • There won’t be a draft.

        Many males of draft age are too fat, too messed up on narcotics, too dysfunctional, or just plain too stupid to be in a modern military or even to be basic infantry, which is no longer an unskilled job if it ever was.

        And while there are plenty of fools who will gladly place Ukrainian flags on their social media, there is no desire to be press-ganged into being cannon fodder for the Brandon or the Cokehead of Kiev. And that’s not to discount the reaction of parents to their sons or daughters being drafted. I know I would be hunting down anyone involved with a draft board and making them wish they would have never become involved in such a venture.

        • Yes, there are much more people who bleat in support of the war in Ukraine, but there are few who would their lives at risk to “save Ukraine”-

        • Moon, it is really pathetic to see what the male of our species are turning into these days. It is a bloody travesty.

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