Hungarian school book, 2022.
via telex.hu
One of the wonders of the new school year is that it brings new textbooks into our lives, giving us a chance to see the world from September to September in a new perspective. This year's eighth-graders, for example, can get a massive boost in their understanding of the crisis and war in Ukraine from the makers of the geography textbook.
We are talking about Ukraine, after all. An independent country whose part of its territory, Crimea, was militarily occupied by Russia in 2014 and then annexed by the international community in a controversial referendum. And of the independent country that was attacked by Russian forces in February this year and which has been fighting a war of defence against the Russian army, with the support of Western states, minus Hungary.
Well, eighth-graders are literally told about it in the textbook below:
"The majority are of Ukrainian nationality, but there is a significant proportion of Russians in the east of the country, and they are the majority in Crimea. The two Eastern Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian) are similar. In the Russian-speaking parts of the country, one-fifth of the population speak a mixed Russian-Ukrainian language. Despite this, the two ethnic groups are often at odds with each other. Their antagonism has also sparked armed conflict over Crimea (4.2)."
And bracket 4.2 refers to a diagram. A drawing that would probably have made the editorial staff of the Free People in 1951 snap their fingers in satisfaction:
Source: National Public Education Portal, 8th grade geography textbook
This is what the geography textbook on the National Public Education Portal can claim about a neighbouring country that has suffered war aggression. That three great powers are squabbling over it. And the Russian invasion of Crimea is as sleepy as imagined in the finest Kremlin propaganda.
I don't know what compulsion to comply and who wrote this chapter, but Péter Szijjártó really should at least give them one of his Moscow medals. If anyone, they deserve it.