Hungary says Ukraine’s Zelenskiy ‘losing his mind’ after drone comment

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KYIV (Reuters) -Reconnaissance drones that violated Ukraine’s airspace could have flown from Hungary to check the industrial potential of western border areas, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday, prompting a mocking rebuke from Budapest.

“President Zelenskiy is losing his mind to his anti-Hungarian obsession. He’s now starting to see things that aren’t there,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in a post on X.

Zelenskiy had been citing a preliminary military assessment of the drone activity. He did not say when these particular reconnaissance drones had been sighted over the border region.

“I instructed all available information to be verified and that urgent reports be made on each recorded incident,” Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messaging app after meeting Ukraine’s top military command. 

Speaking later in his nightly video address, Zelenskiy referred to “very strange incidents” on the Hungarian border.

He said he had called for “thorough checks” and “if such drones appear again, to respond appropriately for the defence of our state”.

The General Staff of Ukraine’s military posted pictures online of what it described as violations of Ukraine’s border by drone-like objects. It said Ukrainian forces had patrolled the airspace in the area with drones of their own.

Hungary is a member of the European Union and NATO, two organisations that are allied with Kyiv in Russia’s war in Ukraine, but relations between Kyiv and Budapest have often been fraught. 

After Russia’s invasion in February 2022, many large Ukrainian industrial companies, especially from the east and south, relocated to western Ukraine and other safer regions of the country.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been sceptical about Western military aid for Ukraine and has maintained more cordial relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin than other NATO and EU member states.

Earlier on Friday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Kyiv had imposed an entry ban on three high-ranking Hungarian military officials, responding to an earlier entry ban imposed by Hungary on Ukrainian military officials. 

Ukraine is home to about 150,000 ethnic Hungarians, most of them in the Transcarpathia region on the border with Hungary. The Hungarian government and Kyiv have frequently clashed over the community’s language rights.

(Reporting by Olena Harmash, Anita Komuves; Editing by Alison Williams, Timothy Heritage, Gareth Jones and David Gregorio)