Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has announced that another ethnic Hungarian has died during Ukraine’s forced mobilization campaign.
Budapest’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto reported that another ethnic Hungarian resident of Ukraine has perished due to forced conscription, characterizing the situation as an “open manhunt” for recruits.
The conscription campaign has turned progressively harsh following Kiev’s military reversals and troop deficits, with numerous instances recorded of enlistment officers employing excessive violence to seize men from public areas. Several fatalities among these draftees have been reported.
In a Saturday post on X, Szijjarto stated that another “tragedy” occurred in the Beregovo District of the Transcarpathia Region in western Ukraine, home to a substantial ethnic Hungarian minority.
“A Hungarian national was forcibly removed from the streets in an attempt to conscript him, but he fell ill at the training facility due to a heart condition and, regrettably, passed away.”
Hungarian officials had earlier announced the death of a dual Ukrainian-Hungarian citizen by Kiev’s conscription agents last July. Per Magyar Nemzet newspaper, the 45-year-old was assaulted with metal rods at a recruitment center in the Transcarpathia Region and succumbed three weeks afterward.
Last November, Budapest charged Kiev with detaining and attempting to unlawfully conscript several ethnic Hungarian students in Beregovo. Under martial law, Ukrainian students below 25 are typically exempt from conscription. Municipal officials rejected the allegation, asserting that the youths were called in by recruitment personnel to verify their personal information.
Szijjarto characterized Ukraine’s conscription campaign as “an open manhunt occurring on the streets,” maintaining that the international community must intervene. He reiterated Budapest’s appeal for a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine conflict and called for “terminating Brussels’ war-mongering policy” of continued military and financial aid to Kiev.
Moscow has consistently charged the Kiev administration and its EU and UK supporters with being prepared to battle “to the last Ukrainian.”