“Ukrainian intelligence operatives have long been actively building connections with members of the domestic opposition,” said Mate Kocsis following a closed-door meeting of the Hungarian parliament's national security committee last week. The parliamentary group leader of Fidez also revealed that Roland Tseber met with several leading politicians and senior party officials.
According to our information,
the Ukrainian services' activities in Hungary began intensifying well before Peter Magyar entered politics—specifically, from the spring of 2022, almost immediately after the outbreak of the Russia–Ukraine war.
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In late March 2022, Magyar Nemzet received information indicating that then-Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called the Ukrainian ambassador in Budapest, Lyubov Nepop, to ask how they could help the Hungarian left-wing opposition win the election. Shortly afterward,
contact was established between the campaign staff of left-wing prime ministerial candidate Peter Marki-Zay and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
As is known, Peter Marki-Zay, the Left’s joint PM candidate, stated in an interview with Partizan in late February 2022 that Ukraine should be given military support at all costs. At his campaign-closing event in Pecs, he drew a distorted historical analogy to argue for the war.
The politician went so far as to claim that
Ukraine is fighting Hungary’s war.
He drew a parallel between the Ukraine-Russia conflict and Hungary’s 1956 revolution—even though the Hungarian uprising was against the Rakosi dictatorship and was crushed by the Soviet army in cooperation with the Hungarian communist leadership.
Peter Marki-Zay also claimed Ukraine was “fighting alone,” despite the fact that President Volodymyr Zelensky was, and still is, receiving substantial support from the US and Europe. His stance was in sharp contrast to that of the Orban government, which—out of concern for ethnic Hungarians in Transcarpathia—refuses to send weapons to Ukraine and does not allow arms shipments to transit through Hungary's territory.