Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, has expressed hope that bilateral ties with Ukraine would no longer deteriorate and the situation of ethnic Hungarians in Transcarpathia would improve.
Speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of European Union foreign ministers, the foreign minister said the fact that a Hungarian MEP from Transcarpathia had not dared return home for Christmas because she had been threatened by the Ukrainian nationalist organization Mitrodvorets was “an abnormal situation”. Nor was it normal for the office of Transylvania’s ethnic Hungarian party and the home of its leader to be vandalized on the pretext of house search. “We’d like to see reassuring progress in Hungarian-Ukrainian relations,” he said.
On the subject of Hungarian-Japanese economic ties, Minister Szijjártó said that Hungary, in line with its policy of opening to the East, had substantially increased its sales to eastern markets. Most investors in Hungary were eastern and brought cutting-edge technologies to the country, he said, adding that Japan played a key role in this process.
The minister said that hopefully the EU and the ASEAN Free Trade Area would soon launch meaningful talks on comprehensive interregional economic trade cooperation, which would be to the benefit of the EU, including Hungary.