Viktor Orban’s Hungary is accused of having conducted an espionage operation in Ukraine, an operation that could have endangered national security. Kiev’s security service has announced that he had dismantled a military intelligence network operating in the Oblast of Transcarpazia by arresting two agents.
According to SBU, this is the first time that the Ukrainian authorities unmask a network of Budapest spies that leads harmful activities for the nation. According to reports, the objectives of the operation included the collection of information on the military defenses, the identification of vulnerability in the terrestrial and aerial defense systems and the evaluation of the socio-political opinions of local residents, in particular the public reaction scenarios if the Hungarian troops had entered the region as “contingent of peace”.
Budapest denies
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjaria said that Budapest has not received any official information on the case and defined the information “Ukrainian propaganda”.
“If we receive official details or information, we can deal with it, but until then it should be treated as a propaganda, to be treated with caution,” he said.
He also relaunched the accusations, expelling two people accused of being spies who worked under diplomatic coverage at the Ukrainian embassy in Budapest. “Today we have expelled two Hungarian spies who worked under diplomatic coverage at the Ukrainian embassy in Budapest,” said Szijjarto in a video on Facebook.
The arrests and the first suspicions
As reported by Kyiv Postthe first suspect is a 40 -year -old former Ukrainian military originally from the Beregov district, recruited already in 2021 as a “dormant agent”. His activator, explained the spokesperson for the SBU Artem Dekhtynko, would be an officer of the Hungarian military services that would order him to start the operations active in September 2024.
In a video released by the services, the man, whose face in the images has been obscured, declares that he had been approached after requested Hungarian citizenship, claiming that in exchange for his espionage activities he would have received money.
The second suspected is a woman, also residing in the transcartpazia region and former member of the Ukrainian Air Force. According to the SBU, he would have provided information on the presence of military aircraft in the area and on the defense systems of the unit in which he had served.
Videos and interceptions
The material collected by the Ukrainian services includes telephone interceptions in Hungarian language between the agent and its contact person, duties documented within an SUV between the two suspicions, exchanges of cash and delivery of smartphones configured for communications involved through Signal. The SBU says that the agents would transmit data on positioning and losses of Ukrainian units to Budapest, in particular on the S-300 air defense systems.
The two arrested are accused of high betrayal in war, a crime that in Ukraine provides for the life sentence and confiscation of assets. The services have specified that the activities of the network did not compromise state secrets nor cause damage to national security, stating that the authorities would have been aware of the potential bonds of the two suspicions with the Hungarian intelligence for some time, and would have followed all their moves closely once activated to dismantle the network.
The objectives of the mission
The SBU investigation would have revealed that the purpose of the espionage mission was to understand what the reaction of the military and civil population of transcapatics would have been if a contingent of peace, in particular the Hungarian army, entered the region, which military equipment and weapons can be purchased on the local market, what is the situation of the migration of the Hungarian population in the region and which military forces are located in transcatics, with how many soldiers and equipment.
The ethnic Hungarians are the largest ethnic minority of transcartpazia, with about 120 thousand Hungarian native speakers representing about 12-13 percent of the 1.1 million total inhabitants in the region. The greatest concentrations of them live in the Valley of the Tysa river, along the border between Ukraine and Hungary.
Tensions with Orban
Hungary is part of the European Union but also of NATO, two blocks that support Kiev in the war against Russia, but the relationships between Kiev and Budapest have often been conflicting. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban showed himself skeptical towards Western military aid to Ukraine and also maintained relations with Vladimir Putin, putting him in contrast with most of the other EU leaders, who tried to isolate the Russian president after the invasion of Ukraine by Moscow in 2022.
Now to make the climate even more explosive has contributed the spread of a video, dating back to 2023, in which the Hungarian Defense Minister Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, apparently in a speech to the troops, declares that the armed forces of his country will interrupt the “peace” activities, will move the national defense policy from alignment to NATO to nationalism and “
The highest ranks of the Hungarian armed forces would have been purged by the officers pro-senza, so that the Hungarian army was ready for combat and able to defend Hungarian sovereignty by itself, according to what Szalay-Bobrovniczky declared. The movie was made public and authenticated by Péter Magyar, opposition leader, who accused Orbán of threatening the cohesion of the alliance and of flirting dangerously with the Kremlin.
