In Luxembourg on 12 October, Hungary’s Foreign Minister Anita Orban met her Ukrainian counterpart, Andrii Sybiha, as Ukraine’s parliament took up the education measure Budapest had made central to its support for further European Union accession talks.
Lawmakers backed the measure with 266 votes, and Rada Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk signed it immediately. President Volodymyr Zelensky signed it into law the same day. The law strengthens education rights for national minorities, enabling children from national minorities and indigenous peoples to learn in their native language alongside the state language.
Within hours, the EU’s member states unanimously backed the opening of accession Clusters 2 and 3 for Ukraine and Moldova. These cover the Internal Market and Competitiveness and Inclusive Growth. An intergovernmental conference was scheduled for 13 October to formally open them.
Orban said passage of the law cleared the way for the next clusters to be opened at that conference. “We welcome today's important step by the Ukrainian Parliament on minority education rights. A positive result of months of joint work and constructive dialogue,” she said. She added: “Thank you to our Ukrainian partners. Let's keep this momentum going!”
The law applies to official EU languages and excludes Russian. Schools in which more than 50% of pupils learn in the relevant minority language may receive special status, while school heads must be proficient in that language.
The provision matters particularly to roughly 80,000 ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine’s westernmost Zakarpattia Oblast. Prime Minister Peter Magyar, whose pro-European Tisza party won Hungary’s parliamentary elections in April 2026, said the measure “will make it significantly easier for Hungarian children in Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia Oblast) to use their mother tongue.”
Kyiv and Budapest had announced an agreement in early summer 2026 on the educational, linguistic and cultural rights of Ukraine’s Hungarian minority. Within weeks, however, Hungary said it could halt Ukraine’s accession unless Kyiv put that agreement into effect, making the minority education law a condition for its approval of new negotiating clusters.
The demand followed a shift in Hungary’s position after Viktor Orbán’s government was replaced in April 2026. Orbán had spent years obstructing Ukraine’s accession talks, saying Kyiv had not adequately protected its Hungarian minority. His government vetoed Ukraine’s accession process for 17 months on those grounds.
Hungary ended that 17-month veto in June 2026 after Magyar’s party won the election. The change was limited. From July through early October, Hungary repeatedly withheld approval of the screening results for Clusters 2 and 3, including on 17 July, 22 July, 1 September and 8 September.
On 17 July, COELA began reviewing the screening results for the two clusters for Ukraine and Moldova. Hungary approved only the third cluster for Moldova and declined to start the process for Ukraine. On 7 October 2026, Hungary lifted its veto on opening Clusters 2 and 3, and EU ambassadors agreed to send Ukraine and Moldova letters inviting them to set out their negotiating positions.
Ukraine applied to join the EU on 28 February 2022. The Fundamentals cluster was formally opened for Ukraine and Moldova in Luxembourg on 15 June. Ukraine has also opened the Foreign Relations cluster.
The accession process consists of 33 negotiating chapters arranged in six clusters. Every one of the 27 EU countries must approve the closure of each chapter once the European Commission has certified that the candidate’s laws meet EU standards. Hungary’s intervention over minority-language schooling shows the leverage that unanimity gives a single member state over the pace of enlargement.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, Vsevolod Chentsov, said on 2 October that Ukraine had met the conditions needed to open its remaining negotiating clusters. He expected the second and third clusters to open in October and the rest by the end of 2026.
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