Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó will meet his Ukrainian counterpart Dmitry Kuleba in western Ukraine on January 29, ahead of an EU summit aimed at unlocking financial aid for the war-torn country.
Relations between the two neighbors have been strained for the past few years and worsened further when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán vetoed €50 billion in EU aid to Kyiv in December.
Seeking to mend ties and "find solutions" to their differences, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has offered a direct meeting with Orban, and talks today between Szijjártó and Kuleba in the city of Uzhgorod aim to lay the groundwork.
Szijjártó has not visited Ukraine since Russia began its offensive against Kiev, although he has been to Moscow several times.
Security in Uzhhorod - home to a large ethnic Hungarian community - was stepped up after a death threat against Szijjártó emerged.
Zelensky's chief of staff Andriy Ermak will also attend the meeting.
Orban is the only EU leader to maintain close ties with the Kremlin since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Earlier this month, Orbán expressed a willingness to support Ukraine, provided the aid is decoupled from the European Union budget and reviewed annually.
The talks come just days before European Union leaders meet for an emergency summit on Thursday to make progress on a stalled aid package for Kiev.
In December, Orbán abstained on a decision to open talks with Ukraine to join the bloc, walking out of the chamber during the vote.
He also called for a negotiated ceasefire with Moscow, saying Ukraine could not win the war.
Minority rights are another point of contention between the two countries.
More than 100,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine, almost all of them in Transcarpathia, which before World War I belonged to Hungary.
To calm relations, in December the Ukrainian parliament passed a law restoring some linguistic rights to national minorities.
But Budapest insists that the status of the Hungarian language must be restored to the situation before Ukraine adopted a controversial law on language education in 2017/BGNES
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