Why Zelenskyy’s photo is all over Hungary

Orbán put Ukraine at the сenter of his election campaign, rallying Hungarians against an external enemy. For a Ukrainian Hungarian man, the cost was personal: he became an enemy of a relative.

KYIV, Ukraine — “You have no Hungarian heart. You’re not Hungarian at all. You’re just a Ukrainian Nazi.”

One day, a Ukrainian Hungarian man named Christian Shkiryak began finding comments like these under his Facebook posts. The catch: the comments were from his own relative.

Christian still couldn’t shake the memories: waking up to his brother’s curse words in Hungarian; fleeing Bucha, in Kyiv Region, just two hours before Russian troops moved in; his damaged apartment and dead neighbors.

But the woman who carries the same surname as his beloved grandmother, the one he used to blow kisses to over video calls, was harassing him.

She was showing up under every post with nothing but curses. His own flesh and blood, living in Hungary, had become his biggest hater and the only person Christian ever blocked on Facebook.

Ukrainian Hungarian Christian Shkiryak. Photo from his socials.

Ukrainian Hungarians like Christian, who carry both identities within them, have for years been living along the fault line between the two countries, caught in the middle of a dispute they never chose.

Hungary — the country they studied and worked in, whose television they grew up watching, where relatives live just across the border with Ukraine — is growing ever more hostile toward the country they call home. In doing so, it is exploiting their Hungarian ethnicity as fuel for government propaganda and political gain.

Orbán’s anti-Ukraine rhetoric has become a central tool in his political campaign for reelection as prime minister set to take place this Sunday, April 12.

This year, posters featuring Zelenskyy flooded the streets of Budapest and other cities, prompting jokes that Orbán’s main political opponent is actually the President of Ukraine, depicted with a sly smile.

Meanwhile, Orbán’s real challenger in this election has emerged as Péter Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s own party. Most people had not heard of until just a year ago, and same goes for his European conservative party, TISZA. For the first time in Orbán’s 16 years in power, a candidate has appeared who is leading him in the polls, and whose party could now secure a majority — TISZA was polling 23 percent higher among decided voters in the second half of March.

That is why Orbán has been actively linking a vote for the opposition with the prospect of Hungarians being drawn into the war.

Across the internet, AI-generated content from Orbán’s Fidesz party has been surfacing, amplifying fears of being drawn into the war in Ukraine. In February, the party released an AI-made video showing a little girl waiting for her father to return from war. In the next scene, he appears bound and blindfolded in captivity before being killed.

Screenshot of a viral AI-generated video from Twitter by Péter Magyar.

In this climate, Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarians find themselves forced to choose sides between two identities they have always considered their own. It becomes a personal tragedy for thousands of Ukrainians who now remain torn between families, friendships and sometimes even a sense of self.

Pin represents Uzhhorod in Zakarpattia region. Screenshot from Google Maps.

Life for ethnic Hungarians in Zakarpattia, home to around 150,000 ethnic Hungarians, has always been a blend of two worlds. In towns and villages where Hungarian communities live in close clusters, shop signs appear in both languages. The dinner table might just as easily hold Hungarian goulash as Ukrainian borscht, and time is sometimes kept by both the clocks of Budapest and Kyiv.

Until the age of seven, Christian barely understood Ukrainian. Yet growing up in Uzhhorod, where there were no fully Hungarian neighborhoods like those found in the border districts of Zakarpattia, Ukrainian culture seeped into his life throughout his childhood.

Even at age 9 when he spent a year living with his mother in Hungary, where she had taken a job at a sanatorium, Christian sensed a certain gap in mentality between himself and Hungarians that were born and raised there.

The gap was mostly cultural. The games Hungarian children played were different. For instance, they didn’t have jump rope or elastic band games like Ukrainian kids. At Christmas, they didn’t go caroling door to door the way people did back in Zakarpattia.

“There was a certain difference — a product of the mix of Ukrainian, Transcarpathian, and Rusyn [another ethnic group in Zakarpattia] identity. It all layers on top of one another and shapes a person you can confidently call a person from Zakarpattia,” Christian said.

Back in Uzhhorod, Ukraine he continued his education at Hungarian-language gymnasiums, where only a portion of subjects were taught in Ukrainian. Then, when he needed to study at university, Christian found himself in the dazzling lights of Kyiv, leaving his native Carpathian mountains behind to pursue a promising future as a sound engineer.

“I had [some] classmates who barely spoke Ukrainian because they didn’t see the need for it. Their grades in Ukrainian simply didn’t matter to them. They were being prepared from early on with the expectation that they would continue their life in Hungary,” he said.

Hungarian-language schooling in Ukraine became the flashpoint for the first major conflict between Budapest and Kyiv, when in 2017 Ukraine introduced mandatory Ukrainian-language instruction for a portion of school subjects. The Orbán government responded by declaring that Kyiv was flagrantly violating minority rights and moved to block decisions related to Ukraine’s closer integration with NATO and the EU.

A silo with poster with an image of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is seen in Budapest, Hungary on 18 March, 2026. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images).

But Hungarian-Ukrainian relations fractured decisively after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Budapest formally condemned Russian aggression, yet over the past four years has consistently blocked the adoption of sanctions, the transfer of aid to Ukraine, and its path toward European Union membership. They argued that Kyiv continues to violate the rights of national minorities.

Now, in the days leading up to the parliamentary elections on April 12, the media reports that coordination between Moscow and Budapest has been ongoing since 2022. In December 2025, the Hungarian government signed a secret agreement with Russia to expand bilateral economic, trade, energy, and cultural ties, according to Politico.

Front-page reports have begun to emerge suggesting that Hungary personally coordinated its EU vetoes with Russia. One consequence of Budapest’s obstruction was that Ukraine has been denied a €90 billion package of financial and military support that was set to begin flowing this month.

“When I came back from Bucha alive, I found out that the first sanctions against Russia had been introduced. But Hungary was the only one dragging its feet, vetoing the decision, refusing to cut Russia off from SWIFT transfers… For the first time, my Facebook started speaking Hungarian,” Christian recalled.

Fleeing shelling and the Russian advance on Bucha in February 2022, a single wrong turn as he and his brother were leaving the city could have cost him his life, as a Russian armored vehicle was shooting at civilians trying to escape.

Since then, he has thrown himself into volunteer and civic work, believing he could change Hungarians’ minds by debunking Orbán’s propaganda on his social media pages. Angry Hungarians frequently appear in his comments, cursing him out, he says. But he doesn’t engage, maintaining what he calls “full democracy” on his page.

Christian Shkiryak wrote a song in Hungarian, based on Orbán’s statements. Video from his Instagram.

There was only one person whose comments Christian couldn’t bring himself to tolerate: his grandmother’s cousin.

“At some point we were messaging each other, and I said some very unprintable things about Viktor Orbán. I told her plainly — because of that idiot of yours, we can’t get the arms package through. After that we stopped talking, and she started ‘communicating’ with me through comments,” Christian said.

Viktor Orbán had been scaring Hungarian voters with the prospect of war as early as the 2022 elections, which helped him secure re-election and gave his Fidesz party a constitutional majority in parliament.

At the time, Orbán’s media empire labeled anyone who provided any kind of military support to Ukraine as ‘pro-war,’ framing it as an attempt to help Ukraine fight back. In particular, Fidesz claimed that the opposition wanted to send Hungarians to the front line. Hungarian society was alarmed by the possibility of being drawn into the war, and as a result, Orbán and his party remained in power.

In January 2024, Hungarians’ attitudes began to worsen, according to a Policy Solutions poll — 51 percent of Hungarians came to view Ukraine as a threat, compared to 46 percent who saw Russia that way.

A campaign poster for the government’s ‘National Petition’ is seen on a street in Budapest, Hungary, on March 3, 2026. (Photo by STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images).

Over all these years, the rift in Сhristian’s family never healed. They never reconciled with their grandmother’s cousin. And this election, he believes, she will likely be among those voting for Orbán.

To her, Christian is likely already a ‘Kyiv regime agent’ for good. And not just to her.

The media empire Orbán has built over 16 years in power, designed to dominate much of the information space, has also branded Christian a pseudo-Hungarian and a man with a questionable past. He was among those who accompanied Orbán’s main challenger, Péter Magyar, to Bucha during his 2024 visit to Ukraine, which could not go unnoticed by the Hungarian authorities.

“Viktor Orbán was in Kyiv, but he didn’t step anywhere beyond the Mariinsky Palace and left straight for Moscow. Péter Magyar, on the other hand, came after the missile strike on the children’s hospital. I think the difference is clear,” Сhristian said.

Péter Magyar is not unequivocally a pro-Ukrainian politician: he opposes military aid to Ukraine as well as its fast-track accession to the EU and NATO. However, his rhetoric is noticeably more conciliatory than Orbán’s. The European Union has placed hopes in his potential victory as a chance to normalize relations with Budapest.

For Christian, it is difficult to accept Magyar’s position when he calls, for example, for negotiations with Russia, as his memories of Bucha are still too fresh. At the same time, he considers such “peace-oriented” rhetoric fairly typical for a Hungarian politician.

“I understand him as a European politician, I understand him as someone who will act in the interests of Hungary. [This] is the demand of Hungarian society, which is very afraid of war and has been very afraid of war,” Christian said.

NEWS OF THE DAY:

By Anastasiia Lutsenko

Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.

TELEGRAM ALMOST FULLY BLOCKED IN RUSSIA: Access to Telegram in Russia has been nearly completely blocked, with connection issues reaching about 95% on Friday morning, according to Epravda.

The level of disruption is the highest since restrictions increased in March and may be even stronger than blocks on WhatsApp and Signal. Users, including those using VPN services, are also reporting problems, with many complaints coming through servers in the Netherlands.

UKRAINE PLANS TO FINISH DRUZHBA PIPELINE REPAIRS IN SPRING: Ukraine says it will complete repairs on the Druzhba pipeline by spring after damage from a Russian drone strike earlier this year, according to UKR.net. Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that most work is already done, but some storage facilities need more time to recover.

The disruption stopped oil supplies to Hungary and Slovakia, leading to tensions. Both countries demanded quick repairs and responded by limiting energy support to Ukraine. Kyiv rejected accusations of delays and called such pressure “energy blackmail.”

RUSSIAN-FLAGGED TANKER MAKES RARE PASSAGE THROUGH STRAIT OF HORMUZ: A Russian-flagged supertanker has passed through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf, a rare move as global shipping remains highly disrupted due to the ongoing conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the United States, according to Bloomberg. The vessel was tracked sailing toward Iran’s main oil export hub before its destination was listed as “for orders,” meaning it had no fixed next stop.

Maritime traffic in the strait has dropped sharply, with many ships avoiding the area due to security risks and rising tensions. The route remains critical for global oil supplies, but shipping companies are increasingly cautious as the conflict continues to affect energy flows and prices.

EU LAUNCHES NEW ENTRY SYSTEM FOR TRAVELERS: The European Union has fully launched a new digital border system called EES across the Schengen Area,according to Unian. It replaces passport stamps with a biometric system that records entries and exits for non-EU citizens, including Ukrainians.

Under the new rules, travelers from Ukraine and other visa-free countries must provide fingerprints and a facial photo on their first entry. After that, border checks will be faster and mostly automated. The system is meant to improve security and track the 90-day stay limit, although some countries are still not fully ready for the rollout.

CAT OF CONFLICT:

Katia saw this cat that lives in one of the children’s hospitals in Kyiv. The name of the black-and-white cat is unknown.

Stay safe out there.

Best,
Mariana