Attending the Hungarian-Russian intergovernmental mixed committee for maintaining military graves in Moscow, the Hungarian defence ministry again raised the issue of the Soviet burial site in Budapest, which came into focus during a recent visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russia has asked Hungary to put the request into the form of a proposal and submit it through diplomatic channels, the ministry said. Back in November 2013, at the suggestion of the radical nationalist Jobbik party, the defence ministry agreed the inscriptions on the memorials were unconstitutional.

The inscriptions refer to the anti-Soviet uprising as a “counter-revolution”, which Hungary would like to change to “the events of 1956”. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has recently been questioned in parliament regarding Putin’s visit to the Soviet memorial honouring soldiers who took part in the crushing of Hungary’s anti-Soviet revolution in 1956.

Orbán responded that Hungary’s attitude to the Soviet memorials has always been ambivalent, but noted that Hungary will accept Russian leaders paying tributes at these memorials, as this gesture is reciprocated in connection with Hungarian soldiers’ graves in Russia.

Source www.hungarymatters.hu

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MTI photo: Kovács Tamás