The Mole at the Table: How Orbán’s Hungary Gave Putin a Seat in Every EU Council Meeting

European intelligence services allege that Hungary's top diplomat fed live readouts of classified EU discussions to Moscow for years, as Russia's SVR plotted a staged assassination to save Orbán's political future

At the European Union summit held in Brussels in late March 2026, Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán once again positioned himself as a victim of international pressure.

Between rounds of discussions, he stepped before television cameras to bemoan the pressure he claimed was mounting against him from all sides. It was a familiar performance — theatrical, combative, and carefully staged for domestic consumption back in Budapest.

But the spectacle unfolding in the corridors of European power concealed a far more troubling reality, one that had begun to crystallize in the minds of European intelligence officials, heads of government, and MEPs across the political spectrum: that the Orbán government had not merely drifted toward Moscow but had, by all indications, been actively serving as its eyes and ears within the most sensitive deliberations of the European Union.

The immediate political backdrop to these events was Hungary's decision to block a ninety-billion-euro emergency loan to Ukraine, a country already teetering on the edge of financial collapse under the weight of Russia's ongoing military invasion.

Orbán justified this obstruction by accusing Kyiv of interrupting the flow of cheap Russian oil through the Druzhba pipeline into Hungary — even though the initial disruption to that infrastructure had been caused by a Russian strike, a fact Orbán conspicuously omitted from his narrative. In blocking the loan, he was defying not only the rest of the European Union but reversing a commitment his own government had made just months earlier in December 2025.

The maneuver fit a well-established pattern: Hungary using its EU membership and voting power to dilute, delay, or outright cancel measures designed to support Ukraine and punish Russia. Budapest had already blocked or watered down multiple packages of EU sanctions against Moscow, and had even succeeded in removing figures such as the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill, from the EU's sanctions blacklist.

But it was a bombshell investigative report published by The Washington Post — written by Catherine Belton, the journalist and author renowned for her deep reporting on the Kremlin's inner workings — that pushed matters to a breaking point.

The report, drawing on information from European intelligence services, alleged that Hungary's Foreign Minister, Péter Szijjártó, had for years been systematically leaking sensitive information from EU meetings directly to his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The mechanism was as brazen as it was simple: during breaks in EU council sessions and ministerial gatherings, Szijjártó would step away to place telephone calls, relaying real-time accounts of what had been discussed — positions taken, arguments made, potential compromise solutions floated — directly to Moscow.

According to one senior security official cited in the reporting, this practice meant that, effectively, Moscow had been sitting at the table in every EU meeting for years.

The political shockwaves from this revelation were immediate.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, never one to shy from directness, posted on social media that the news should not surprise anyone. He stated that suspicions about Hungary's behavior had existed for a long time and acknowledged that those suspicions had shaped his own conduct in European Council meetings: he had taken the floor only when strictly necessary and had said only as much as was absolutely required. His admission was remarkable — a sitting head of government of a major EU member state conceding that he had, in effect, been operating under counter-intelligence protocols within the formal institutions of the bloc of which both Hungary and Poland are members. Tusk stopped short of providing additional details, but his words carried the unmistakable weight of someone confirming a long-held fear that had now been given evidentiary form.

The Hungarian government's response followed a well-worn playbook.

Orbán's spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, dismissed the story as false and insinuated — without providing any evidence — that Polish intelligence had planted the story in The Washington Post in order to damage Orbán and his Fidesz party ahead of the Hungarian parliamentary elections scheduled for April 12.

The Kremlin, through spokesman Dmitry Peskov, simply called it another example of disinformation and declined to engage with the substance of the report. The SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service, also refused to comment. These denials were unconvincing to most European observers, who noted that neither the Hungarian government nor Russia offered any factual rebuttal of the specific allegations, instead retreating into the language of conspiracy and delegitimization.

Within Brussels, the reaction ranged from carefully calibrated institutional concern to outright fury.

A spokeswoman for the European Commission under President Ursula von der Leyen described the allegations as extremely worrying. She emphasized that a relationship of trust between member states and between those states and EU institutions was fundamental to the functioning of the entire European project. She called on the Hungarian government to provide clarification.

The language was measured, as is customary for official Commission statements, but the message beneath the diplomatic surface was unmistakable: the executive arm of the EU regarded these allegations as a potential threat to its institutional integrity.

In the European Parliament, the response was less restrained. René Repasi, the head of the SPD delegation, described the situation as an enormous breach of trust, though he admitted it was not entirely surprising given Hungary's conduct in recent months.

His concern centered not only on the act of information transfer itself but on its systemic consequences: if the heads of government and ministers of EU member states could no longer speak openly in closed sessions without fear that their words would be transmitted directly to Moscow, the capacity of Europe to function as a coherent political actor in times of crisis would be fundamentally compromised.

In the current geopolitical environment — with a war raging on the European continent, with questions of military aid, sanctions, and diplomatic strategy being decided in real time — the implications of such a breach were not merely procedural but existential.

Moritz Körner, a German MEP from the liberal FDP party, was blunter still. He described Orbán as a Kremlin mole and a danger to European security, arguing that every veto cast and every secret shared weakened Ukraine's defensive lines. He called on Hungarian voters to remove what he called a defector and a traitor to Europe at the ballot box.

Daniel Freund, a Green Party MEP and one of Orbán's most persistent and well-informed critics in the Parliament, went further than almost anyone in his public statements. Freund argued that the evidence, which he said had been accumulating for years, pointed to only one conclusion: that Hungary under Orbán was actively working with Russia against Europe's interests. He called for Hungary to be suspended within the EU — stripped of its voting rights and excluded from participation in internal meetings. For Freund, the transmission of internal EU information to Vladimir Putin was not a diplomatic incident but a fundamental violation of the bloc's founding values.

These were not fringe positions. Behind closed doors, multiple European capitals had reportedly been discussing for some time the possibility of advancing the Article 7 procedure against Hungary — the formal mechanism under EU treaties for addressing member states that persistently violate the rule of law and democratic norms.

The procedure had been initiated years earlier but had remained frozen, in part because of political complexities and in part because the required threshold of support had not been reached. Now, there was a growing sense in Brussels and other European capitals that if Orbán survived the April elections and returned to power, the political will to push the Article 7 process to its conclusion — including the potential suspension of Hungary's voting rights — might finally coalesce into action.

The Washington Post investigation went considerably further than the Szijjártó allegations, however. It also revealed the outlines of what was described as an internal document produced by a unit of Russia's SVR, the foreign intelligence service, which was obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence agency.

That document, reportedly prepared for the SVR's Directorate MS — sometimes referred to as the Department of Active Measures, the unit responsible for political influence operations — contained a startlingly explicit proposal. Concerned by the prospect that Orbán might lose the April election, the authors of the document proposed what they called a "game-changer": the staging of a fake assassination attempt against Viktor Orbán.

The goal, as articulated in the document, was to fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign by shifting it from the rational domain of socioeconomic issues — where Orbán was vulnerable due to Hungary's poor economic performance — into the emotional realm of national security and political stability.

The document's reasoning drew explicitly on recent political history. The report cited the attempted assassination of Donald Trump during the 2024 American presidential campaign as a precedent. That incident had produced a surge in sympathy for Trump and a significant upswing in polling support that was widely credited as a contributing factor in his eventual victory over Kamala Harris. The SVR document appeared to suggest that a similar manufactured crisis in Hungary could produce a comparable effect, rallying voters around Orbán on the grounds of personal danger and national emergency rather than forcing him to defend a record characterized by economic stagnation and democratic erosion.

No such attack had taken place as of the time of publication, and it remained unclear whether the proposal had ever been advanced beyond the internal planning stage or whether the Russian government itself had reviewed or approved the document.

Orbán's spokesman did not respond to the newspaper's request for comment on this specific element of the story. Despite the uncertainty about whether the plan had ever been seriously considered for implementation, the mere existence of such a document — if authentic — spoke volumes about the depth and operational character of the relationship between Moscow and the Hungarian government. It was not merely a matter of shared ideology or diplomatic alignment; the Kremlin's intelligence apparatus was treating the continuation of Orbán's rule as a strategic interest worthy of active intervention.

This framing was reinforced by other details in the investigation. The report described how Hungary had provided Moscow with what amounted to a sustained window into the EU's most sensitive deliberations, not only through Szijjártó's alleged telephone updates but also through the penetration of Hungary's Foreign Ministry computer networks by Russian hackers.

This cyber-espionage component meant that even when Hungarian officials were not actively transmitting information, Russian intelligence services had independent access to internal Hungarian government communications and documents that related to EU affairs. The combination of human intelligence — the phone calls, the personal relationships, the physical access of Orbán-aligned officials to EU institutions — and technical intelligence represented a comprehensive intelligence apparatus operating at the heart of the European Union.

The allegations also touched on Olivér Várhelyi, Hungary's European Commissioner, who had in recent weeks been implicated in a separate media investigation suggesting that he had been involved in a Hungarian government effort to spy on European institutions in order to monitor the state of proceedings against Hungary. Taken together, these reports painted a picture of a systematic and multi-layered effort by the Orbán government to use its insider access to EU institutions not to contribute constructively to European decision-making but to undermine it — extracting intelligence that could be used to frustrate EU processes, protect Hungarian interests in ongoing legal proceedings, and serve Russian strategic priorities.

It is worth pausing to understand the full significance of Szijjártó's alleged conduct in the context of his extraordinary relationship with Moscow. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Szijjártó had made no fewer than sixteen official visits to Moscow — an almost unimaginable figure for a foreign minister of an EU and NATO member state at a time when most Western governments had drastically curtailed or eliminated high-level contact with the Russian government. Those visits were widely noted and frequently criticized by Hungary's European partners, but they continued uninterrupted. Szijjártó maintained a warm personal relationship with Lavrov, and Hungarian officials made no effort to conceal their view that engagement with Russia was not merely permissible but desirable. The Washington Post's investigation alleged that the relationship had extended well beyond legitimate diplomacy into the active transmission of intelligence — a distinction that, if confirmed, would transform Szijjártó from a controversial diplomat into something closer to an agent of a foreign power.

The political context within Hungary itself added another layer of complexity to these events. Orbán was heading into the April 12 election in the weakest position he had occupied since first returning to power in 2010. For the first time in his political career, polling consistently showed him trailing his main challenger: Péter Magyar, the leader of the Tisza party and a former member of the Fidesz establishment who had broken with Orbán more than a year earlier in protest over a corruption scandal involving figures close to the government. Magyar had emerged as a genuine political phenomenon in Hungary — articulate, energetic, and capable of drawing enormous crowds. His pitch was simple but powerful: he presented himself as an anti-corruption reformer who could clean up Hungarian political life without abandoning the conservative values that many of Orbán's supporters held. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, he had already demonstrated his electoral reach, with his party capturing nearly thirty percent of the vote.

The SVR polling data cited in the intelligence document revealed that a majority of Hungarians — 52.3 percent — were dissatisfied with the state of the country, and that this dissatisfaction extended even to rural areas that had historically been Fidesz strongholds. The economic situation was the primary driver of discontent: inflation, wage stagnation, and a sense that ordinary Hungarians had not benefited from the Orbán years in the way the government's triumphant rhetoric suggested. Magyar had been relentless in pressing this theme, framing the election as a choice between continued corruption and mismanagement on one hand and a genuine chance at reform on the other.

Orbán's campaign strategy in the face of these unfavorable conditions was revealing. He had increasingly sought to redirect the conversation away from domestic economic failures toward external threats — framing the election as a contest between Hungary's sovereignty and the interference of Brussels, Kyiv, and unnamed foreign elites. Péter Magyar was portrayed not as a legitimate domestic opposition figure but as a puppet of the Brussels establishment, a foreign-sponsored agent of disruption. The EU was cast as the villain: an overbearing, culturally alien bureaucracy seeking to punish Hungary for defending its independence and Christian identity. Orbán used the EU summit not only to block the Ukraine loan but to perform his victimhood for domestic cameras, complaining of pressure from all sides while barely disguising his satisfaction at the spectacle he was creating.

In this context, the Washington Post revelations landed at an almost impossibly consequential moment. Magyar seized on them immediately. Speaking at a campaign rally over the weekend following publication, he called Szijjártó's alleged conduct an absolute betrayal — not just of Hungary but of Europe as a whole. He described the Foreign Minister as having betrayed his own country and the continent to which it belonged. For Magyar, the story offered something rare in politics: a single, vivid, easily communicable illustration of everything he had been arguing about the Orbán government's character. This was not a technocratic failure or an abstract rule-of-law concern; it was, if true, a government minister secretly briefing an adversary power on the private deliberations of Hungary's supposed allies.

For European governments watching from outside Hungary, the moment crystallized a set of frustrations and fears that had been accumulating for years. The sense in Brussels and other European capitals was that the Orbán government had, for a long time, not been trusted with sensitive information — that informal workarounds had already been constructed to limit Budapest's access to the most delicate deliberations. Multiple European leaders and officials had long since drawn the pragmatic conclusion that candor in EU meetings was unwise when Hungary was present. Tusk's remarkable admission on social media made explicit what had apparently been an open secret among European security officials: the integrity of EU discussions had already been compromised, and participants had adjusted their behavior accordingly.

The question now before Europe was what to do next. The options ranged from the symbolic to the structural. At the symbolic end, European leaders could call for investigations, issue formal demands for clarification, and publicly express their concern — steps already being taken. At the structural end lay the Article 7 procedure, with its potential to strip Hungary of its EU voting rights and exclude it from meetings where sensitive matters were discussed. In between lay various intermediate possibilities: adjusting procedures for sharing classified or sensitive information within EU forums, pursuing the allegations through national or European legal channels, or coordinating a political response contingent on the outcome of the Hungarian election.

The election itself loomed as the immediate variable. If Magyar were to prevail on April 12, much of the urgency would dissipate — a new Hungarian government aligned with European values would be expected to cooperate with any investigation, sever the intelligence relationships with Moscow, and begin the slow process of restoring trust with European partners. If Orbán were to win, however, the situation would be qualitatively different.

A re-elected Orbán government, emboldened by another victory and holding the same positions on Ukraine, Russia, and the EU, would likely interpret its mandate as validation of everything it had done.

In that scenario, European leaders who had long been reluctant to escalate the conflict with Budapest would face intense pressure to act — to finally advance the Article 7 procedure, to redesign EU decision-making processes to limit Hungary's influence, and to consider what it might mean, practically and legally, for an EU member state to be functioning as an instrument of a hostile foreign power.

The stakes of the Hungarian election had always been significant, but the revelations of March 2026 transformed them into something far larger.

What was nominally a domestic political contest between two Hungarian politicians had become a test case for the integrity of the European Union itself — for whether its institutions could maintain their coherence and security in the face of a member state that appeared to have subordinated its European obligations to its relationship with Moscow. The answer Europe gave to that question, and the answer Hungarian voters gave at the ballot box, would reverberate well beyond the borders of a single central European nation.

In an era defined by the return of great-power conflict to European soil, the question of where Hungary's loyalties truly lay had ceased to be a matter of political philosophy and become, inescapably, a question of security.

Sources and Further Readings

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