Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry: Hungary is not letting diplomats visit Ukrainian POWs transferred from Russia

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, and other involved bodies of Ukraine continue to take steps towards bringing eleven Ukrainian POWs back home after Hungary had received them from Russia without notifying the Ukrainian government or any international human rights organisations, the spokesman for the ministry Oleh Nikolenko said.

“All attempts by Ukrainian diplomats in recent days to establish direct contact with Ukrainian citizens were unsuccessful. <…> In fact, they are kept in isolation, do not have access to open sources of information, their communication with relatives takes place in the presence of third parties, they are denied of the right to establish contact with the Embassy of Ukraine,” he stated.

Furthermore, Ukraine’s attempt to establish a dialogue with the Hungarian authorities using official diplomatic channels are being ignored, Nikolenko added.

“Such actions of Budapest call into question the declared humanitarian motives for the transfer of Ukrainians to Hungary. In addition, they can be qualified as a violation of the provisions of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms,” he continued.

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry has once again called upon Hungary to immediately allow the Ukrainian consul to visit the Ukrainian POWs, so that he could assess their physical and psychological state, inform them about their rights, and provide immediate consular support.

On 9 June, Deputy Prime Minister of Hungary Zsolt Semjén announced that Russia had handed over 11 Ukrainian servicemen from the Uzhhorod region to Hungary. They ended up imprisoned during the wars in Ukraine. According to the press service of Russian Patriarch Kirill, the Russian Orthodox Church assisted with the proceedings.

Afterwards, the Hungarian charge d’affaires ad interim in Kyiv was summoned to Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry. “The Ukrainian government was not informed about the respective negotiations between Hungary and Russia. We found out from public statements by Hungary’s deputy prime minister that Russia had handed eleven Ukrainians with Hungarian roots over to Budapest,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said back then.