Lithuania and Canada oppose Hungarian initiative to revise NATO's cooperation with Ukraine
Hungary's proposal to reconsider NATO's cooperation with Ukraine that was earlier sent to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was criticized by representatives of Lithuania and Canada at a meeting of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly on May 26, Ukrinform reports.
"One of the Visegrad Group countries is trying to use NATO as a tool to block the NATO-Ukraine meeting, which is unacceptable, and therefore I ask our Hungarian colleagues to help ensure that the Hungarian government does not use NATO as a tool to resolve problems between Ukraine and Hungary," the delegate from Lithuania said.
The representative of Canada, in turn, said that at one time, he visited schools of national minorities in Ukraine and that he could confirm that the right to use native languages is respected there. According to him, there is nothing strange in the revision of the domestic legislation of Ukraine with the purpose of propagating the native language, which is quite a normal situation and is done in all countries.
"The blocking by one country of the process of Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine looks very problematic to us and surprising from a political point of view," he stressed.
The delegate from Hungary noted that officially, Budapest will always support the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine and condemn the illegal annexation of the Crimea by Russia, but he believes that with the new law on education, the Ukrainian government "builds a nationalist country instead of rapprochement with the West." He added that Hungary is counting on NATO solidarity on this issue.
On May 25, Hungary, which has been blocking the meetings of the Ukraine-NATO Commission, sent a document to NATO headquarters proposing to review the policy of cooperation with Ukraine. The document entitled "Memorandum: The Initiative for the Establishment of a New NATO Policy towards Ukraine" was approved at the inaugural first meeting of the renewed Hungarian government, headed by Viktor Orban.
In February, Hungary blocked the meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Commission at the level of defense ministers. Budapest claimed that their actions were meant to pressure Kyiv into revising the language norms of the law on education.