Hungary Turns Towards the Carpathians
By Matthew Parish
Saturday 26 September 2026
Something rather remarkable has happened in Central Europe over the course of a few days. Hungary, which initially reacted to Ukraine’s new Carpathian Eight initiative with indignation, has suddenly indicated that she might join it after all. The reversal is particularly striking because only days earlier Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar had ridiculed the idea that Hungary had somehow become a member of an international organisation without first agreeing to join it. On 25 September, however, the Hungarian Foreign Ministry announced that recent misunderstandings with Kyiv had been cleared up and that Hungary was open to new regional cooperation initiatives, provided their objectives, methods and benefits to Hungary were properly defined. Hungarian Foreign Minister Anita Orbán went further, saying that membership of the Carpathian Eight might follow after further discussions.
This is not quite Hungarian membership of the Carpathian Eight. Nevertheless it represents a substantial change in tone, and it is worth asking why it has happened so quickly. The answer lies partly in the peculiar circumstances surrounding the birth of the organisation, but more importantly in the transformation of Hungarian politics following the defeat of Viktor Orbán in April 2026. What at first appeared to be an obscure diplomatic quarrel about membership of an equally obscure new regional organisation is becoming an illustration of something much larger: Hungary is reconsidering where she belongs in Central Europe.
The Carpathian Eight was formally launched by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Bukovel on 18 September. Its proposed members are Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Czechia, Austria and Serbia, with the European Union participating alongside them. The organisation is deliberately broad in its ambitions. Security, energy, transport, trade, investment and cross-border development are all within its contemplated activities, while almost one hundred business projects worth approximately €40 billion were presented in connection with the inaugural summit.
The underlying idea is more interesting than another diplomatic talking shop might initially suggest. The Carpathian Eight seeks to turn the geographical space surrounding the Carpathian Mountains and Basin into an economic region connecting Ukraine with Central Europe and the Balkans. Roads, railways, electricity interconnectors, pipelines, storage facilities and border crossings consequently matter at least as much as declarations by foreign ministers. The inaugural meeting already produced more than €1 billion in agreements, according to the Ukrainian government’s account reported after the summit, with a substantial emphasis upon renewable energy and reducing dependence upon Russian energy supplies.
That last objective immediately explains some of Hungary’s initial nervousness.
The quarrel that lasted four days
The opening of the Carpathian Eight was diplomatically untidy. Ukraine announced Hungary as one of its participants even though Budapest had apparently never formally agreed to become a member. Hungary sent a diplomatic representative to Bukovel, but Prime Minister Magyar subsequently insisted in parliament that Hungary had merely been invited and had declined. The Hungarian representative did not participate prominently in the summit proceedings.
A remarkably Central European quarrel followed. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha accused the new Hungarian government of perpetuating the obstructionism of the Viktor Orbán period. Magyar replied with an analogy involving a village football team: one cannot simply announce that somebody is playing and then tell him to bring the ball. Hungarian Foreign Minister Anita Orbán, no relation to the former Prime Minister, responded that the new government had already made substantial gestures towards Ukraine and rejected the suggestion that its policies amounted to a continuation of Viktor Orbán’s approach.
There was another source of friction. Budapest also rejected the suggestion that Hungary would host strategic Ukrainian fuel reserves under a proposed cooperation arrangement involving the Hungarian energy company MOL and Ukraine’s Naftogaz. Energy is an exceptionally sensitive subject in Hungary because the country remains overwhelmingly dependent upon Russian hydrocarbons. More than 90 per cent of Hungary’s oil and gas imports currently come from Russia, according to figures cited by S&P Global and reported by Reuters, and the Magyar government is seeking an extension of an American sanctions exemption while MOL undertakes the technological changes necessary to diversify supplies.
Then, almost as abruptly as the dispute began, it subsided. Anita Orbán met her Ukrainian counterpart several times during the United Nations General Assembly’s high-level week in New York. The Hungarian Foreign Ministry subsequently announced that the misunderstandings had been resolved. Discussions continue over the rights of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia, while Budapest stated explicitly that it remained open to regional initiatives once their practical value was established.
This therefore looks less like a genuine strategic rejection followed by a conversion than an argument about procedure concealing a deeper process of Hungarian repositioning.
The revolution in Budapest
To understand the episode one must begin with the Hungarian election of April 2026. Viktor Orbán lost power after sixteen years and Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won an extraordinary parliamentary majority. Magyar came to office promising a more European Hungarian foreign policy, institutional reform and a reduction in the political isolation that had accumulated during the later Orbán years.
This does not mean that Magyar has transformed Hungary overnight into an unqualified supporter of every Ukrainian objective. He has explicitly opposed accelerated Ukrainian membership of the European Union and has retained a distinctly Hungarian position on the treatment of the approximately 100,000 ethnic Hungarians in Transcarpathia. Nor has he proposed severing relations with Moscow. The new government appears instead to be pursuing what might be described as normalisation: Hungary may disagree with Brussels, Warsaw or Kyiv on particular questions without making permanent obstruction of their policies the organising principle of Hungarian foreign relations.
The first important breakthrough came in June. Budapest and Kyiv reached an agreement concerning Hungarian minority language, educational and cultural rights in Ukraine. Hungary consequently permitted the opening of the first cluster in Ukraine’s European Union accession negotiations, although Magyar continued to oppose any accelerated route to membership.
There was an important domestic economic incentive behind the broader European reset. When Magyar arrived in office, billions of euros in European Union recovery and structural funds remained frozen over rule-of-law and anti-corruption disputes inherited from the previous government. The new administration began negotiations with Brussels to recover those funds and announced its intention to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. Hungary’s economy had meanwhile experienced approximately three years of stagnation and its public finances were under considerable strain.
The distinction is important. Magyar does not need to become pro-Ukrainian in every respect to conclude that perpetual confrontation with Ukraine is economically and strategically expensive. He merely needs to conclude that Hungary gains more from being inside the rooms in which Central Europe’s future infrastructure is designed than standing outside them.
The Russian question
Then came perhaps the clearest symbolic break with the previous era. On 8 September Hungary expelled ten Russian diplomats for activities Budapest said were incompatible with their diplomatic status. Under Viktor Orbán, Hungary had maintained unusually close relations with Moscow even after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and had repeatedly impeded European sanctions and assistance measures. Russia promised retaliation for the expulsions.
The Magyar government has nevertheless been careful not to convert this into an ideological rupture with Russia. Hungary still wants Russian oil and gas, still wants Washington to extend the sanctions exemption permitting those purchases and still insists upon maintaining diplomatic dialogue with Moscow. This is therefore not a simple substitution of one allegiance for another.
It is better understood as diversification.
For years Hungary placed a disproportionate part of her strategic weight upon a relationship with Russia while using membership of the European Union and NATO partly as leverage against her own partners. The emerging Magyar policy appears to reverse that formula. Hungary remains willing to deal with Russia where her economic interests require it, particularly in energy, but she is increasingly unwilling to allow those relations to determine her position within Central Europe.
That change makes the Carpathian Eight considerably more interesting to Budapest.
Follow the roads
International organisations survive when they acquire concrete economic purposes. The Carpathian Eight has a plausible opportunity to do so because the war in Ukraine has transformed the economic geography of Central Europe.
Before 2022 much of the region’s infrastructure reflected an east-west economic logic inherited partly from the Soviet period and partly from post-Cold War integration with Western Europe. Russian hydrocarbons travelled westwards. Central European manufacturing supply chains pointed towards Germany. Ukraine remained economically peripheral to the European Union despite possessing enormous agricultural, industrial and mineral resources.
War has disrupted this arrangement. Ukraine increasingly needs north-south and west-east corridors connecting her to Polish ports, Romanian ports, Central European railway systems, European electricity networks and alternative sources of fuel. Poland, Romania and Ukraine therefore have powerful reasons to construct infrastructure that once appeared economically secondary.
Hungary lies directly in the middle of this emerging map.
That gives Budapest a problem. If Hungary remains outside regional integration, infrastructure can eventually be designed around her. Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine can develop alternative transport, electricity and energy corridors. Hungary would then possess all the geographical advantages of occupying the centre of the Carpathian Basin while capturing surprisingly few of the economic benefits.
Membership of the Carpathian Eight offers the opposite possibility. Hungary could become a logistical junction between the Balkans, Ukraine and Central Europe. Hungarian railway operators, construction companies, banks, logistics businesses and energy companies could participate in the enormous reconstruction economy that will accompany Ukraine’s eventual recovery. Budapest would also gain influence over which roads, railways, pipelines and electricity connections are built.
This is where geopolitics becomes concrete. Foreign policy may be discussed in speeches, but regional power frequently follows railway lines.
Energy and the great Hungarian dilemma
Energy may ultimately provide the strongest reason for Hungary to join. The apparent contradiction between Budapest rejecting Ukrainian fuel storage and simultaneously contemplating membership of the organisation promoting precisely such regional cooperation is less strange than it looks.
Hungary cannot eliminate Russian energy dependence immediately. Refineries, pipelines and power infrastructure cannot be redesigned by ministerial declaration. The Magyar government is therefore seeking additional time under American sanctions exemptions while MOL adapts its facilities.
Yet precisely because this dependence constitutes a vulnerability, Hungary has an incentive to participate in whatever replaces it.
The emerging regional energy system may include liquefied natural gas entering through Poland and Croatia, Romanian Black Sea gas, Ukrainian storage facilities, expanded electricity interconnection, nuclear generation and renewable energy distributed across Central Europe. Poland’s Orlen has already agreed further LNG and fuel supplies for Ukraine, illustrating how quickly commercial energy relationships created by the war are becoming permanent regional infrastructure.
Hungary has little reason to exclude herself from such developments. She has every reason to negotiate hard over their terms.
This distinction may explain the apparently erratic diplomacy of the last week. Budapest objected when Kyiv appeared to announce Hungarian participation as a fait accompli. Once Hungarian sovereignty over the decision was acknowledged, the economic question became different: why would Hungary voluntarily exclude herself from a regional investment programme encompassing precisely the infrastructure she will require to reduce her excessive dependence upon Russia?
What becomes of Visegrád?
There is also a larger political consequence. For years the Visegrád Four — Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia — appeared to constitute the natural political grouping of Central Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fractured it. Warsaw and Budapest developed radically different attitudes towards Moscow, while governments changed elsewhere and the coherence of the Visegrád format weakened.
The Carpathian Eight represents a different organising principle. It expands Central European cooperation southwards to Romania and Serbia, westwards to Austria and, most importantly, eastwards to Ukraine. Instead of asking how the states between Germany and Russia should organise themselves, it asks whether Ukraine herself can become part of the political and economic architecture of Central Europe.
Hungarian participation would make that proposition considerably more credible.
It would also prevent the emergence of competing geographical blocs. A Carpathian organisation containing Poland, Romania and Ukraine but excluding Hungary could gradually develop into a strategic corridor running around Hungary’s eastern and northern edges. A Carpathian Eight including Budapest instead becomes a genuinely regional institution in which Hungary occupies the geographical centre.
For Péter Magyar, participation therefore need not imply endorsement of every Ukrainian policy. Quite the reverse: membership would provide Hungary with another forum in which to defend Hungarian interests, including the interests of ethnic Hungarians in Transcarpathia.
Ukraine learns diplomacy
There is a lesson here for Kyiv as well. Ukraine’s original handling of Hungary was unnecessarily clumsy. Announcing another sovereign country as a participant before its government believed that it had consented inevitably invited a reaction. Whatever one thinks of Magyar’s football metaphor, the underlying diplomatic objection was comprehensible.
Yet Ukraine appears to have corrected the error rapidly. The meetings in New York transformed public recrimination into direct diplomacy within days. That matters because Ukrainian foreign policy increasingly requires something different from wartime appeals for solidarity. Ukraine is attempting to construct institutions that may survive the war.
The Carpathian Eight is potentially one of them.
If it succeeds, Ukraine will cease to be merely the recipient of Central European assistance and become one of the organisers of Central European economic geography. That is a profound change. European integration would then be occurring not only through the formal mechanisms of Brussels accession negotiations but through roads, electricity networks, investment projects and commercial relationships created before Ukraine formally enters the European Union.
Hungary has good reason to want influence over that process.
A Carpathian settlement
None of this means that Hungary has suddenly become Ukraine’s closest ally. Significant disagreements remain over Ukrainian EU accession, minority rights, Russian energy, financial assistance and the appropriate degree of confrontation with Moscow. Magyar’s government has repeatedly demonstrated that its European turn has limits. The Hungarian Foreign Ministry’s latest language is itself cautious: Budapest is open to regional cooperation and wants further clarification of the Carpathian Eight’s purposes and added value.
Nevertheless something important has changed.
Under Viktor Orbán, disagreement with Ukraine gradually became part of Hungary’s political identity. Under Péter Magyar, disagreement increasingly looks transactional. Budapest may oppose one Ukrainian proposal on Monday, negotiate about it on Wednesday and discover an acceptable compromise by Friday. That may appear less dramatic than ideological friendship, but in international politics it is often much more productive.
The Carpathian Eight could therefore acquire significance beyond its slightly eccentric birth. If Hungary eventually joins, all the principal states surrounding the Carpathian space will have accepted that they possess economic interests which cannot sensibly be pursued independently. Ukraine will have created a regional institution in which she is a central rather than peripheral participant. Hungary will have reinserted herself into Central European diplomacy without surrendering her ability to pursue distinctive national interests.
Most importantly, the economic map of the region may begin to change. The Carpathians have historically been imagined as boundaries: mountains separating peoples, empires and economies. The premise behind the new organisation is that modern infrastructure can turn them into the opposite — the centre of a network of transport, energy, commerce and investment stretching from Poland to Serbia and from Austria to Ukraine.
Hungary’s volte-face therefore matters less because Budapest may have changed her mind about membership of another international forum than because it suggests that Hungary has begun changing her mind about the political geography in which her future lies. The old Hungarian strategy rested upon balancing Brussels against Moscow. The emerging one may be based increasingly upon embedding Hungary within the countries immediately around her.
If so, the most consequential development in Central Europe this month may not be that the Carpathian Eight has acquired an eighth member. It may be that Hungary has rediscovered the Carpathians.
