Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said today that there are “very difficult issues” that must be resolved before negotiations on Ukraine’s accession to the European Union begin, Reuters reported, BTA reported.
EU countries must decide in December whether to start negotiations on Ukraine’s accession to the EU, which requires the unanimous support of all 27 countries in the bloc. According to diplomats, however, Hungary may prove to be an obstacle to the start of negotiations.
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“At the negotiations in Brussels on the future of Ukraine, which will take place in the autumn, we cannot avoid the question whether we can really seriously consider membership and start accession negotiations with a country that is at war,” Orbán said on Hungarian state radio .
“We don’t know how big the territory of the country is, since the war is still going on, we don’t know how big its population is, because people are fleeing… to accept a country in the EU without knowing its parameters would be unprecedented,” Orbán pointed out. “I think we have to answer very long and difficult questions before we get to the stage of deciding whether to start accession negotiations,” the Hungarian leader said.
Orban maintains warmer relations with Moscow than many other EU leaders and has repeatedly clashed with Kiev, including over the right of ethnic Hungarians to study in their native language after Ukraine passed legislation in 2017 limiting the use of minority languages in schools, notes Reuters. Orban said on Monday that Hungary will not support Kiev on any international issue until the linguistic rights of ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine are restored, the agency recalled.
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2023-09-29 08:52:00
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