Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said as Hungary has kept the channels of communication open with Russia, it stands ready to convey messages as an intermediary to Russia in the interest of peace and saving more lives.
Speaking at a peace summit on Ukraine in Switzerland on Sunday, Minister Szijjártó said he represented a country which had been living in the shadow of the war for the last almost two and a half years as a neighbor of Ukraine and experienced directly the war’s humanitarian consequences. Hungary has already received more than 1.3 million Ukrainian refugees including families torn apart, the minister said, adding that Hungary had ensured access to Ukrainian families to health care and education. The children of those families currently attend 1,600 schools and kindergartens, Szijjártó said. He said that Hungary was carrying out its largest-ever humanitarian aid programme and would continue it as long as necessary. Since there is a community of 150,000 ethnic Hungarians living in western Ukraine, Hungary “knows very well the suffering of the citizens of Ukraine, including the Hungarians in Transcarpathia, have had to experience” over the past two and a half years, he said. “We know how many of them have been mobilised to the frontline and how many of them have died.” “We don’t want more people to die in this war and more families to be torn apart,” Szijjártó said. “We are basically the last country in Europe which has not cut the channels of communications with the Russian Federation,” he said, adding that “therefore we can be instrumental in this regard, to save the kids, to save further families from being torn apart”. “But please don’t see it as a bad thing that the channels of communication are kept open.” “We are ready to engage,” the foreign minister said, adding that Hungary was ready to convey any message to Moscow or St Petersburg.