Ukrainian Foreign Ministry to Orbán: Ukraine's territory remains unchanged

"I consider it a positive development that the Prime Minister of Hungary is concerned about Ukraine's EU accession. We would like to inform him, that Ukraine's territory remains unchanged, it continues to be surrounded by its internationally recognised borders," Oleg Nikolenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry wrote on his Facebook page in response to Viktor Orbán's statement in his interview on public radio on Friday morning saying that Ukraine is in a territorial war, so we don't know how big its territory is.

“Should one start negotiations with a country that's at war? Especially if it's a territorial war. So we do not know how much territory this country has. The war is still ongoing. We don't know what its population is, because they have fled.”

– the Hungarian Prime Minister said on Kossuth Rádió on Friday.

Orbán added that the entire system of the European Union is based on what the size of a country is and how big their population is, so admitting someone "without knowing their parameters" would be without precendent.

The Ukrainian foreign affairs spokesman has reacted to the Hungarian Prime Minister's statements before, for example after the interview Viktor Orbán gave to Tucker Carlson. In the interview, Orbán said that if any Western country sent troops to the battlefield in Ukraine, it would be guaranteed to lead to the outbreak of World War III. "We don't know how it works in Hungary, but Ukraine doesn't trade either its territory or sovereignty," Oleg Nikolenko retorted in late August.

This is not the first time the Hungarian Prime Minister has said something to antagonise Kyiv. He has previously called Ukraine a no-man's land and a financially non-existent country. "Russia's goal is to turn Ukraine into an ungovernable wreck so that the West can have no claim to it. They have already succeeded, Ukraine is now like Afghanistan, a no man's land. However, Russia must not allow NATO to enter Ukraine," Orbán told foreign journalists at a media conference organized by Mathias Corvinus Collegium earlier this year.