Ethnic Hungarians have been having a tricky time in Ukraine

“This is not our war,” says Dorottya, a kindergarten janitor, using the words of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister. “This is a Hungarian village.” But Kidosh is in Ukraine, ten kilometres from the border, in a belt along the frontier inhabited mostly by ethnic Hungarians. Gabor, her 14-year-old son, says he does not feel Ukrainian, does not speak Ukrainian and since “life is not good here”, he wants to go to a boarding school in Hungary, whence he will probably never return.Official Hungarian-Ukrainian relations have been frosty for years and the war has . As a result, Ukraine’s Hungarian minority has suffered. Its numbers have been shrinking and the war is accelerating the exodus. Its members are also divided. Karoly Sass, a winemaker in Kidosh, says that of course “this is our war, we live in this country!”