Kiev’s ‘open manhunt’ for conscripts must stop – Budapest
Another ethnic Hungarian man living in Ukraine has died as a result of forced mobilization, Budapest’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said, describing the situation as an “open manhunt” for conscripts.
The recruitment drive has grown increasingly brutal amid Kiev’s military setbacks and manpower shortages, with hundreds of cases being documented of draft officers using excessive force to snatch men from the streets. There have been multiple reports of deaths among these conscripts.
Szijjarto said in a post on X on Saturday that another “tragedy” has happened in the Beregovo District of Transcarpathia Region in the western part of Ukraine, where a significant ethnic Hungarian minority is based.
”A Hungarian was forcibly taken from the streets, they wanted to conscript him, but he became ill at the training center, given that he had a heart disease and, unfortunately, he died.”
Budapest authorities previously reported the death of a man with dual Ukrainian and Hungarian citizenship at the hands of Kiev’s draft enforcers last July. According to Magyar Nemzet newspaper, the 45-year-old was beaten with metal rods at a conscription center in Transcarpathia Region and died three weeks later.
In November, Budapest accused Kiev of detaining and attempting to illegally conscript a group of ethnic Hungarian students in the town of Beregovo. Ukrainian students under 25 are generally exempt from the draft under martial law. Local authorities denied the claim, saying that the young men had been summoned by the recruitment officers to confirm their personal data.
Szijjarto described the Ukrainian conscription drive as “an open manhunt taking place on the streets,” insisting that it’s time for the international community to take action against it. He repeated Budapest’s call for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict and urged an “end [to] the war-mongering policy of Brussels,” which keeps supporting Kiev militarily and financially.
Moscow has repeatedly accused the Kiev government and its backers in the EU and UK of being willing to fight “until the last Ukrainian.”
