It was a picture of pure Magyar machismo. Muscled men dressed in black, armed to the teeth, and with “Counter-Terror” emblazoned on their uniforms, swooped on a convoy of vans carrying $80 million in cash and gold bullion.
The men inside are dragged to the ground, their faces pushed into the tarmac as they are handcuffed. Within hours, a video of the arrests, complete with an added music background track, was circulated by Hungarian government officials on social media.
You might be forgiven for thinking that this was an operation against thugs and smugglers, or perhaps kingpins of pan-European organized crime.
In fact, it was the latest salvo in a growing conflict between Hungary and Ukraine, as the former seeks to foment a stand-up fight with its eastern neighbor, which is still engaged in a life-or-death struggle to hold back the Russian invader.
Relations between Budapest and Kyiv were warm in the early years after the fall of the Soviet Union. But ever since Viktor Orbán returned to power in 2010, wielding his particular brand of populism, they have steadily worsened.
The animus between the two countries is built on two central pillars.
The first is that Hungary has a small minority in Ukraine, somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 ethnic Hungarians who ended up on the wrong side of the border after the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.
To hear it from Budapest, this minority has been persecuted and abused, though in reality — and I have made two visits to the region in the last three years and talked at length to Hungarians living there — they have extensive, though not perfect, language and cultural rights.
The second issue is that while Orban has become increasingly anti-liberal and anti-Brussels, he has sidled up to Moscow, which is unconcerned by his democratic backsliding, and established close political, economic, and (according to some) intelligence ties with that country.
This, of course, has maddened Ukraine at a time when it is fighting for its very existence.
Several times since 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Orbán has blocked aid to Kyiv (most recently trying to derail a €90bn, or $104bn EU loan to Ukraine), as well as obstruct any chance Ukraine might have of gaining early entry to the bloc.
None of this is great, but developments in recent months have made things much worse.
Hungarian elections are due to be held on April 12, and most polls show Orbán, who is now deeply unpopular among many Hungarians, between 10 and 20 points behind the opposition challenger, Peter Magyar.
Late last year, I met a Hungarian government insider who told me that Orbán had already decided that the focus of his election campaign would be to play “the Ukraine card.”
Though not especially cogent, the government says something like this: if Hungary supports Ukraine, it will eventually be dragged into a full-scale war with Russia. And when that happens, its sons will begin to die on the frontline (though of course, neither Nato, nor the EU, nor Ukraine are asking Budapest to send troops to fight Russia.)
Orbán, and his Fidesz party, first began putting up anti-Ukrainian posters last year.
One shows a menacing-looking Zelenskyy next to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. A slogan underneath reads: “Don’t let them make decisions above our heads.” Others showed photos of golden toilets — a Ukrainian official who was recently charged with corruption had a gold-plated loo.
Most Hungarians groaned at such crude tactics. But with some, the messaging has begun to resonate.
“What on earth did they think when they started a war with Russia?” a long-time Hungarian acquaintance told me, ignoring the fact that it was Russia that attacked Ukraine.
Another old friend, an unashamed supporter of the Hungarian government, referenced the toilet while ignoring the fact that the Orbán clique has made Hungary the most corrupt country in the 27-member EU.
The Hungarian strongman has built a €12.5 million football stadium in his tiny home village, his son-in-law has won a wealth of Hungarian state contracts, and his childhood friend, a former gas fitter, is now Hungary’s richest man and worth an estimated $2.5 billion.
Many Hungarians, and especially the younger generation, do not share the views of their nationalist government.
In February 2022, I watched as thousands of ordinary Magyars rushed to help desperate Ukrainian refugees streaming into Budapest by train. But on the online Magyarsphere, the blast of anti-Ukrainian propaganda has become intense. In one video, Zelenskyy is portrayed as a fool owned by the West, and suggestions are made that Magyar is a Zelenskyy facsimile.
And then, in late January, Orbán’s anti-Ukrainian campaign was given a vigorous boost by an unexpected development. The Russians bombed the Druzhba pipeline in Ukraine that runs from Russia and supplies much of Hungary and Slovakia’s oil.
A large storage tank was damaged, and the Ukrainians closed the pipeline down, saying it needed repairs. Budapest soon began accusing Kyiv of not repairing the pipeline as quickly as it might have done (possibly true). Ukraine responded that it had greater priorities than mending a pipeline that took oil from one of its enemies, Russia, to another, Hungary (definitely true).
The EU — which is constitutionally bound to represent the interests of member states — urged Kyiv to try harder to fix the pipeline. It offered to send a team to inspect the damage. Orbán, meanwhile, took the opportunity for revenge and blocked the EU’s loan to Ukraine. He added that Hungary would reopen the pipeline “by force” if necessary.
Orbán’s spin doctors also got to work.
In a particularly saccharine AI-generated ad, a little Hungarian girl was shown asking her mother when her daddy would come home. The video then flipped to the picture of a man — apparently her father — being executed on the frontline.
“Don’t let others decide our fate!” a solemn voice intoned.
With just under a month to go until the Hungarian elections, many now fear that Orban is only going to ratchet tensions up further.
Some reports even suggest that Moscow is sending social media specialists linked to the GRU military intelligence agency to Budapest to help Fidesz ahead of the elections.
“Orbán is Russia’s biggest foreign policy success in Europe,” a Budapest-based analyst told me over dinner earlier this year. “They’re not going to let him go easily.”
The Ukrainians who were arrested late last week turned out to be employees of a state-run bank and were released to Ukraine. The gold and the cash — at the time of writing — are still being held by Budapest.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is slowly running out of money. Nobody expects an early end to this increasingly bitter fight.
Julius Strauss is a former foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph who writes and reports on Russia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and the Balkans in his newsletter Back From the Front, where this article was first published.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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