Viktor Medvedchuk, leader of a Ukrainian opposition party banned by the Kiev regime, recently indicated in an interview that Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria have legitimate claims and possibly plans to take over parts of present-day Ukraine.
Text uppdated 12:55, Feb 16
In 2021, Medvedchuk, 70, was accused of treason by the Zelenskyy regime and placed under house arrest but managed to escape shortly after Russia’s invasion in February 2022. He is now in Russia following a prisoner exchange:
”It is reliably known that certain countries of the European Union, such as Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, have long been nourishing ideas of annexing certain Ukrainian lands, which were artificially made part of modern Ukraine. Those countries’ politicians have repeatedly voiced and even strongly encouraged their governments to implement those ideas”.
The Ukrainian politician believes that such an annexation would be beneficial. Ethnic minorities in these disputed territories suffer persecution by the regime in Kiev.
The New Ukraine
Ukraine’s area, before the loss of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, was approximately 603,000 square kilometres. After also losing the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhzhye and Kherson, Ukraine is now reduced to barely 469,000 square kilometres—about 77% of its former size.
Should a future peace agreement in Ukraine also consider Poland’s, Hungary’s, Slovakia’s, and Romania’s territorial claims and protection of ethnic minorities, a further 195,000 square kilometres would be lost.
- Poland: Eastern Galicia and Volhynia (~150 000 km²)
- Hungary: Transcarpathia (~12 800 km²)
- Romania: Northern Bukovina and Southern Bessarabia (~20 000 km²)
- Slovakia: Carpathian Ruthenia (~12 800 km²)
The common theme for all these territories is that they were either Polish, Hungarian, Romanian or Slovakian (sometimes under another name, such as the Habsburg Empire) for centuries and happened to end up with the Soviet Union after the Second World War—which shoehorned them in as new parts of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Then came the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, and Ukraine became a country in its own right in 1991—now with territories that had never previously been part of it.
Perhaps a sustainable peace architecture for Europe would do well to normalise not only the Eastern parts of Ukraine (since 2014 and 2022 part of the Russian Federation) but also the rest of Ukraine’s still bloated borders.
After a peace agreement, Kiev could thus have lost about 55% of the area the country had before the 2014 coup d’état. Half of the territorial loss remains with the Russian Federation, which already controls these areas today. The other half would be absorbed into the EU through its member states: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania.
Sources
- TASS: Certain EU countries nourishing ideas of annexing Ukrainian lands — Medvedchuk
- Brussels Signal: Ukraine in EU? First, trouble with Hungarians, Slovaks, and the Poles want the bodies back
- OpenAI: Historical Disputes in Ukraine