Everyone spies on their neighbors, and even their allies. They’re polite about it, and don’t much discuss it (except for the occasional scandal), but they do it with gusto. That being said, there’s spying and spying.
The type of spying that upsets countries is that which aims to seriously undermine national security and, possibly, reveals an intention to seize territory. That’s the kind of that Ukraine accused Hungary of conducting on May 9, and that has set off secondary explosions involving tirades of accusations and expulsions — with both countries releasing footage of large men hauling off suspects.
Ukraine alleged it had uncovered a network of Hungarian agents tasked to gather information on Ukrainian air defense capabilities, map civilian infrastructure, and assess public sentiment in Zakarpattia Oblast (Transcarpathia), a region that has switched hands more times than most people can remember (Hungary seized it from Czechoslovakia at Hitler’s invitation in 1938, and Stalin later annexed it.)
These days, it’s not Hungarian government policy to reclaim these lands, but the illiberal and nationalist Prime Minister Victor Orbán makes little secret of his interest in what happens there, as elsewhere in former Hungarian territory. There may only be 150,000 Hungarians in Transcarpathia, slightly more than 10% of the population, but that is enough for blood and soil nationalists to claim it as theirs.
The information sought by Hungarian military intelligence from Ukraine’s westernmost edge would be extremely helpful to Russia’s war of aggression. Russian military radars cannot track air defense systems over the Carpathian Mountains. They would love to, though and Hungary is much closer. Ukrainian air defense units based there have shot down numerous missiles crossing this air space.
According to the screenshots featured in the official Ukrainian video, Budapest’s agents were also supposed to gather information on whether locals would oppose the arrival of Hungarian “peacekeepers”, and to map and document critical and civilian infrastructure.
These suspicions were not helped by audio leaked in May of Hungary’s Defense Minister Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky speaking privately in 2023 and stating that the government was changing its former “peace mentality” and making the armed forces combat-ready. Hungary has sacked many of its NATO-trained senior officers in recent years.
Hungarian-Ukrainian relations have been tense for almost a decade. In 2017, Ukraine passed an education and then a language law restricting the use of minority languages (although they were not applied and were changed in 2023 due to EU pressure). The Orbán administration responded by blocking the country’s NATO and EU integration steps. It meanwhile praises and has fostered ties with Vladimir Putin’s regime based on deepening business and ideological relations with Russia.
Despite Western efforts to isolate the Russian leadership since 2022, Hungarian ministers regularly visit their Russian counterparts, with Orbán himself meeting Putin last summer right before the NATO summit, and fervently criticizing NATO and the West.
The Orbán government has relentlessly opposed Western help to Ukraine, using vetoes and procedural blocks to hinder Ukraine’s relations to the EU and NATO, and to ease sanctions on Russia, a country that supplies much of its energy needs.
Ukraine is not the only neighbor where Hungary has tried to influence events. In Romania, Orbán endorsed the nationalist firebrand candidate, George Simion. Leaflets distributed in Hungarian-speaking areas of Romania showed the two men’s pictures side by side. The Hungarian leader’s intervention was unexpected given Simion’s previous involvement in nationalist demonstrations in Hungarian war cemeteries, and seems to have disastrously rebounded — voting maps indicated more than 90% of Hungarian speakers backed the moderate presidential candidate, Nicușor Dan.
What’s Orbán’s aim? The main short-term goal is to keep power, and that means a steely focus on the charismatic new leader of the opposition, Péter Magyar, and his Tisza party, which leads in opinion polls, the first party to achieve this for several years. Orbán has suggested that Tisza was somehow involved in the Ukrainian spy row.
The longer-term goal among many Hungarian nationalists has been to question and undermine the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that greatly reduced its territory to benefit Hungary’s neighbors — Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Austria. The interwar state was fundamentally revanchist and carried out extensive hostile intelligence operations against its neighbors (Czechoslovak military intelligence arrested more than 250 Hungarian agents, including army officers from 1936-38, according to František Moravec, a senior Czech officer).
Hungary’s post-1989 successor, while less openly hostile, has toyed with the issue time and again, for example, offering passports to as many as three million people with a Hungarian link but living outside the country and writing a “responsibility” for the linguistic diaspora into its constitution.
The Orbán government now has a seriously troubled relationship with its two biggest neighbors in Ukraine and Romania. That hardly fits its slogan of promoting peace and the interests of Hungarian people both at home and abroad. Unfortunately, there’s little sign of improvement any time soon.
Dorka Takácsy is a researcher, focusing on disinformation and propaganda in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia. She is a visiting fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a research fellow at the Centre for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy. She is also pursuing a PhD at the Corvinus University of Budapest, researching Russian domestic disinformation about the West.
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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