Headlines
Hungary says Ukraine's Zelenskiy 'losing his mind' after drone comment
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on September 26, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
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Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on September 26, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
Ukraine's Zelenskiy alleges drones from Hungary violated airspace, sparking tensions. Hungary dismisses the claims, escalating diplomatic friction.
KYIV (Reuters) -Reconnaissance drones that violated Ukraine's airspace could have flown from Hungary to check the industrial potential of western border areas, 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.
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.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said earlier on Friday that 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 and Gareth Jones)
A reconnaissance drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle used for surveillance and gathering intelligence, often employed by military forces to monitor enemy activities or assess geographical areas.
A military assessment is an evaluation conducted by military officials to analyze the capabilities, strategies, and potential threats of opposing forces or situations.
Ethnic Hungarians are individuals who identify as Hungarian, often living outside Hungary, such as in Ukraine's Transcarpathia region, where they maintain their cultural heritage.
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