Ukraine has barred three senior Hungarian military officials from entering the country in a tit-for-tat move after Budapest imposed entry bans on several Ukrainian officers.
“We’ve imposed an entry ban for three high-ranking Hungarian military officials,” Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha wrote in an X update on Friday, Sept. 26.
Sybiha said the decision was a “mirror response” to what he called Hungary’s “baseless” ban on Ukrainian military personnel announced in July
“Hungary’s every act of disrespect will be met with adequate response, especially disrespect for our military,” Sybiha added.
This statement follows the July measure by Budapest, announced amid outrage over the death of a Hungarian-Ukrainian man in Zakarpattia, which barred three Ukrainian officers from entering Hungary: Colonel Vitaliy Tkachenko, head of personnel at the Ground Forces Command, Brig. Gen. Volodymyr Shvedyuk, commander of Operational Command West, and Colonel Roman Yuzvenko, head of the Defense Ministry’s mobilization department.
Kyiv has rejected Budapest’s claims that Ukrainian forces were responsible for the man’s death and said medical exams pointed to a pulmonary embolism, not physical abuse.
Tensions escalated further in late August, when Hungary extended an entry ban to Robert “Magyar” Brovdi – commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces and an ethnic Hungarian – after Ukraine claimed responsibility for a strike on Russia’s Druzhba oil pipeline that supplied Russian oil to Hungary.
Brovdi responded to the ban with a sharp rebuke.
“Shove your sanctions and restrictions on visiting Hungary up your **s, Mr. ‘Dancer on Bones.’ I am Ukrainian, and I will arrive in my father’s homeland after you. There are enough real Magyars in Hungary, and someday you will get f**ked by them,” he wrote.
Brovdi wrote that as an ethnic Hungarian and Ukrainian soldier, he considers the protection of the Druzhba oil pipeline not to be a defense of Hungary’s sovereignty, but rather “their own dirty pockets filled with cheap raw materials subject to sanctions.”
Brovdi said he believes Hungary’s purchase of Russian oil makes its authorities “complicit in the multiplication of blood money that flies back in the form of rockets and ‘shaheds’ on peaceful cities in Ukraine.”
Diplomatic tit-for-tat in recent months has also included expulsions and public recriminations. In May, Kyiv expelled two Hungarian diplomats after alleging an espionage network connected to Hungarian services. Budapest responded in kind, and the two capitals have since exchanged sharp public statements.