“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.
Worthless People
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.
By late March 2022, Ferenc Gyurcsany, then head of the Democratic Coalition, was fanning the flames of war sentiment fiercely, saying
you'll become worthless people or you'll die.
"Which would you choose? This is the option Orban leaves to you. We avert our eyes from the death and humiliation of thousands, millions because if we don't, if we help, we’ll invite Satan’s revenge and die ourselves," he said. He went on saying "According to Orban, the price of our lives is sin. We must become rotten scum in order to live." According to Gyurcsany, “every Hungarian who refuses to die for Ukraine is a rotten person.”
Militant Momentum
Momentum also took its share in war-mongering. From the outset of the conflict, the liberal party demanded that Hungary send weapons and even troops to the front lines.
It’s clear that NATO must help Ukraine by providing the weapons it needs to win this war,
said then MEP Katalin Cseh in March 2022. Similar sentiments were expressed by Andras Fekete-Gyor and Daniel Berg. The latter specifically urged the delivery of military gear to Ukraine and demanded that arms shipments be allowed to pass through Hungary.
Notably, in November 2022, Momentum politicians traveled to Kyiv "as a symbol of support for Ukraine” and to show that "Hungary is not the same as Viktor Orban". Marton Tompos stated the trip was organized with help from Istvan Balog, chargeé d'affaires at the Ukrainian Embassy in Budapest, and based on existing connections from past events and conferences.
Momentum was not alone. Budapest’s Mayor Gergely Karacsony, from the Parbeszed (Dialogue) party, also made it to Kyiv,
where he met not only Mayor Vitali Klitschko but also senior Ukrainian officials, the mayor of Bucha, and top EU diplomats.
Jobbik’s U-Turn
The sharpest reversal came from Jobbik. Marton Gyongyosi, who was elected party leader in the summer of 2022, was previously known for his pro-Russian stance. After Crimea’s annexation, he visited Moscow and stated that
his party saw the West, not Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine,
insisting that Moscow merely protected Russian minorities. Jobbik's foreign policy expert described the 2014 referendum that paved the way for Russia's annexation of Crimea as a triumph of self-determination.
This same Gyongyosi—who once traveled to Donbas, occupied by Russian separatists, as an election observer and advocated for Hungary’s exit from NATO in an interview a few years ago—joined the Left’s pro-war campaign in the spring of 2022. In a Facebook post at the time, he warned that after Ukraine, Hungary could become Russia’s buffer zone and dismissed Prime Minister Orban’s policy of strategic calm as deception, despite the fact that this approach has safeguarded Hungary’s security. He even accused the Hungary's PM of drawing an equivalence between aggressor and victim.
Then, in December 2022, in an interview with a Ukrainian portal, Marton Gyongyosi stated that it had been a big mistake on his part to be present as an observer at the "fake elections" held in the Donetsk Basin (Donbas).
Jobbik's chief apologized for this,
explaining that he had been outraged at the time over Ukraine’s minority language law, but assured everyone that he now fully supports Ukraine.
