How Viktor Orbán's citizenship offer in western Ukraine is threatening to unravel European unity over Russia

Timea Enyedi took her place by the blackboard in her second floor class room and asked her 14 year old pupils to open their textbooks.

On the wall behind her, a poster bore the coat of arms and the blue and yellow colours of Ukraine. But the books, the language of instruction, and the portraits of literary figures decorating the classroom, were all Hungarian.  

A disconcerting linguistic agility is just one of the anomalies of life in this tiny Habsburg city on the far eastern edge of the Carpathian Basin. 

Over the past century alone, the city of Berehove was incorporated into Czechoslovakia in 1920; reclaimed by Hungary during the Second World War; annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945; and finally became part of an independent Ukraine after the Soviet collapse in 1991.

Today, most people here are bi or even tri-lingual; five catholic, orthodox, and protestant denominations jostle for congregations; and two national flags - the Ukrainian and Hungarian - hang outside the town hall. 

Shoppers in the town centre were loading up on gifts and decorations for both Catholic and Orthodox Christmases (in December and January) - as well as New Year, which in post-Soviet tradition supersedes both as the main holiday of the season.  

If that were not confusing enough, locals of all backgrounds live on Budapest time - putting them an hour behind the rest of Ukraine. 

“You have to understand, this place was never really been part of the Soviet Union in the trues sense. People here have lived in four counties without ever moving house,” said Andras Kacsur, the director of Berehove’s Hungarian language theatre. 

Now  the city has become the subject of a diplomatic crisis that threatens to unravel European unity on Russia sanctions and create a fresh border dispute for an embattled Ukraine. 

The roots of the confrontation here go back at least 100 years. 

In 1920, the treaty of Trianon, a post-First World War settlement, handed two thirds of Hungary’s historic kingdom to new countries that emerged from the break up of the defeated Austrian-Hungarian empire.

At a stroke, the treaty created one of Europe’s largest national minorities - and a fury among many Hungarians that has dominated the country's political landscape ever since.

The 150,000 Hungarians living in Ukraine today are part of a more than two million strong diaspora also spread across Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia. 

When he became prime minister for the second time in 2010, Viktor Orban eased citizenship requirements for Hungarians living abroad and lavished money on cultural and social programs. 

Berehove was an instant beneficiary. 

Its Hungarian Institute, a higher education institution housed in a sumptuous Habsburg era mansion, was renovated and some schools and nurseries received subsidies for teaching materials, and a Hungarian government fund began to pay teachers financial subsidies to held with living costs. 

Meanwhile, the Hungarian consul in the town began to quietly hand out passports to anyone who could pass a simplified language test. 

But after a revolution in Kiev and Russia’s annexation of Crime in 2014, Ukrainian authorities began to take a dimmer view of such activities. 

Relations nose dived after Ukraine adopted a law in 2017 that requires schools to use Ukrainian as the language of instruction from grade five onwards - a move Hungary described as an assault on its minority. 

As tensions mounted, a group of Ukrainian nationalists pulled down the Hungarian flag over the town hall and a Hungarian cultural centre was firebombed in a neighbouring town. 

Things came to a head in October, when Ukraine expelled Hungary’s consul in the city after a video emerged of him distributing passports to locals and warning them to keep their new dual nationality secret from Ukrainian officials. 

Hungary retaliated by expelling a Ukrainian diplomat, accused Kiev of pursuing “an extreme campaign which incites hatred against Transcarpathian Hungarians,” and threatened to veto Ukraine’s EU and Nato integration. 

They were not empty words. 

European diplomatic sources speaking on condition of anonymity told The Sunday Telegraph that Hungary has indeed attempted to obstruct just about any initiative within the EU to assist Ukraine - to the point of raising questions about Mr Orban's relationship with Moscow. 

"The Hungarians are being very obstructive because of this language thing. But to what degree that is about helping Putin I just don't know," said one EU diplomat familiar with sanctions policy.   

Unlike Mr Putin, Mr Orban’s has made no actual territorial claim on Zakarpatia. Even if he did, the military and political feasibility of Hungary pulling off a Russia-style "Crimean operation" is slim to the point of invisible. 

Rather than expansionism, his motives seem to combine promoting cultural identity among the diaspora with hard-nosed domestic political calculation. 

“It’s known and a long-standing phenomenon is that the majority of the Hungarians beyond the borders vote for right-wing Hungarian parties, and in particular by a big margin for Fidesz,” said András Rácz, a security policy analyst at Political Capital, a Budapest think tank. “That goal is the more important for the government in the short and medium term.”

About a million diaspora Hungarians are thought to have taken citizenship in recent years. 

A recent adjustment to electoral law will also allow Hungarian citizens living outside the EU to vote in European parliamentary elections in May - potentially providing an important boost to the Fidesz vote when Mr Orban facing street protests at home over a controversial labour law.

Back in Berehove, the political squabbles of governments seem far removed from day to day life.

None of the people The Sunday Telegraph interviewed there admitted to personally taking Hungarian citizenship.

But all said they knew people who had. The strength of pro Hungarian sentiment in the city is impossible to ignore.

Throughout the city centre Hungarian flags fly, streets bear the names of Hungarian heroes, and statues of Hungarian literary figures are draped in red, white, and green ribbons.

At school 10, Peter Veress, the ethnic Hungarian headteacher, is indeed fretting about the implications of the language education law.

“The law has been adopted. But no one seems to have thought about how it is going to work in practice,” he said. "We currently teach in Hungarian and Russian. We have to make the change by 2020, but there are no materials and no methodology."

Mr Veress says he would like the government in Kiev to amend to law to let ethnic minority schools continue instruction in un-related subjects like science in their own language, and teach Ukrainian like a foreign language - a solution he argues would lead to more children learning the language to a decent level.  

But in the meantime, he has another headache. The working class district the school serves has suffered mass emigration, sending the number of pupils - and therefore the school’s entitlement to funding - plunging. 

Ms Enyedi, the Hungarian literature teacher estimates 90 per cent of the last class she taught left the country after graduation - most of them to find jobs in Hungary, the Czech Republic, or Britain on Hungarian passports.

“There’s a whole commune of people from Berehove in London,” said Mr Veress. “Why do I stay? I’m a patriot of my town. But this is a poor district. It’s those with the least who go first.”

In fact, say many locals, the popularity of Mr Orban’s passport scheme has less to do with Magyar identity than with hard economics. 

Zoltan Babjak, the ethnic Hungarian mayor of Berehove, estimates the town has lost 4,000 young people in emigration to the EU in recent years. And it is, he says, a serious problem.

“That’s tax payers, customers for the cafes and restaurants, demand for bread in the shops,” he sighed in a interview before the (bilingual) ceremony for switching on the lights on the municipal Christmas tree last week.

“There’s going to be an election,” said Mr Babjak  drily when asked why rhetoric about Ukraine’s language law has suddenly intensified. 

Ukraine is due to hold a presidential election in March next year. Petro Poroshenko, the incumbent, has sought to shore up nationalist credentials amid the intractable conflict with Russia, including by taking a hard line on language rights.

Mr Babyak added: “I’m frankly tired of questions about separatism. My major problems are the economy, investment, and the poor attractiveness of Ukraine for foreign investment."

“The people trying to make a confrontation out of this are radicals. And they are not from Carpathia,” he said.