KYIV (Reuters) -President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday reconnaissance drones had violated Ukrainian airspace, citing a preliminary military assessment that they had flown from Hungary to check the industrial potential of western border areas.
A Hungarian government spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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.
“I instructed all available information to be verified and that urgent reports be made on each recorded incident,” Zelenskiy said on Telegram after meeting Ukraine’s top military command.
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 closer relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin that other NATO and EU member states.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Kyiv had imposed an entry ban for 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 Transcript 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 and Timothy Heritage)
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