The ‘Twitter wars’ between Ukraine and Hungary, a defining feature of the historic low in relations during the endgame of Viktor Orbán’s 16-year premiership, are officially back sooner than many expected, as Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha launched an unusually harsh attack on Prime Minister Péter Magyar.
In an X post on Monday night, he accused the Tisza government of continuing what he called ‘Orbánism’ after Budapest rejected membership in Kyiv’s recently launched regional initiative, the Carpathian Eight. ‘It seems that while Viktor Orbán is gone, his policies of obstructionism and isolationism continue to thrive,’ Sybiha claimed, adding that the practice had done ‘no good to Hungary or the wider region’.
The dispute dates back to last Friday, 18 September, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy launched the so-called Carpathian Integration Initiative, or C8, presenting it as a cooperation format linking Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Austria, Czechia and Hungary around security, energy and economic partnership. During the inaugural summit, however, only six countries signed the joint declaration, with Czechia and Hungary abstaining. Explaining the controversy earlier, Kyiv said Hungarian representatives attended at a later stage of the summit, particularly to discuss economic cooperation.
On Sunday, Ukraine’s state-owned Naftogaz and Hungary’s MOL signed a memorandum on jointly developing petroleum-product storage facilities on Hungarian territory near the Ukrainian border to serve the Ukrainian market and place additional fuel reserves inside NATO borders, beyond the theoretical red line of Russian attacks. The project remains preliminary, with no capacity, timetable or final investment decision announced.
‘Magyar said that Hungary had been invited but was not a member of the Ukrainian initiative’
Magyar nevertheless rejected the proposal outright on Monday, saying MOL had negotiated without the government’s consent and that no such Ukrainian fuel-storage facility would be built under the Tisza government. MOL responded that the memorandum only launched technical, financial and regulatory feasibility work, which could take years, and said government consultations would follow if the project advanced.
Speaking of C8 more broadly, Magyar said that Hungary had been invited but was not a member of the Ukrainian initiative. ‘We were invited, and for good reason we did not go,’ he said ambiguously, adding that the government would announce such a decision publicly if it were to happen. The Foreign Ministry subsequently confirmed that Budapest had not joined the declaration, although acting chargé d’affaires Ádám Ceglédi had been present at the forum.
Sybiha reacted hours later with an unusually sharp post on X, saying Kyiv was surprised by Magyar’s ‘unnecessarily confrontational statements’ and did not understand Hungary’s ‘categorical rejection’ of an initiative which, he argued, was intended to promote prosperity, connectivity and mutually beneficial projects across the Carpathian region.
He also criticized Budapest’s intervention in the MOL–Naftogaz project, arguing that ‘when politics interferes with pragmatic business cooperation, nothing good comes of it.’ The Ukrainian foreign minister ended his post by stating that despite the disagreement, Ukraine remained open to ‘mutually beneficial, pragmatic, and respectful bilateral cooperation’ with Budapest.
Magyar replied at around 11pm on Monday night by criticizing Ukraine for effectively claiming that Hungary belonged to the Carpathian Eight without the government’s prior consent, calling the move ‘completely unacceptable’. He brought in a peculiar analogy about forming a football team in the ‘next village’, enrolling strangers without their consent and making them also ‘bring the ball’. Users quickly discovered where that came from: the prime minister lifted the analogy almost verbatim from a Facebook comment posted under his own page only minutes earlier.
After Magyar, much of Budapest’s diplomatic leadership appeared in Sybiha’s comment section. Foreign Minister Anita Orbán said that Hungary had not joined C8 ‘as a matter of fact’ and insisted that international energy cooperation could not bypass the Hungarian government. Orbán concluded by highlighting that Budapest had offered ‘quite a number of gestures’ to Ukraine, rejecting Sybiha’s analogy with the ‘obstructionist policies pursued by Viktor Orbán’.
Chairman of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee Márton Hajdu sharpened Orbán’s framing, stating that it ‘takes two to tango’ and adding that it was ‘time for Ukraine to deliver’ on improving relations.
Underlying the tense exchange on social media is a deeper issue that has poisoned Hungarian–Ukrainian relations for quite some time: the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia. Budapest and Kyiv reached a political agreement in June on restoring language, educational and cultural rights, after which Hungary allowed progress on the first EU accession cluster. Magyar now says Ukraine has not fully implemented those commitments and is again withholding support for further clusters, while Kyiv insists it has already adopted the agreed measures and that outstanding issues should be resolved during the accession process.
The episode quickly revived memories of the late Orbán-era public clashes between Sybiha and his former colleague Péter Szijjártó, which became an almost routine feature of bilateral relations. The two, sometimes joined by Orbán and Zelenskyy as well as some of the most hawkish EU member states, waged an incredibly intense war of words on X. Between January 2025 and April 2026, the two foreign ministers directed at least two dozen posts at each other, at times replying to one another several times within a single day.
The comment section also revealed how quickly the pro-Ukraine social media community can turn against leaders who go against Kyiv’s interests—which, especially in Eastern Europe, is not unusual. Magyar was already being compared directly with his predecessor, with users arguing that Orbán’s departure had changed the personnel in Budapest but not Hungary’s underlying approach to Ukraine. One widely shared line in an EU-focused Reddit discussion claimed that ‘Orbán is not a problem, Hungary is’, while others described Magyar as holding ‘basically the same opinions’ on Ukraine; memes posted under Sybiha’s replies similarly portrayed the new prime minister as following Orbán back towards Moscow.
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