On March 19, Orbán attended an EU summit in Brussels at which he maintained his veto on a EUR 90 billion loan to Ukraine agreed by EU leaders in December. He linked its release to the restoration of Russian oil supplies via the war-damaged Druzhba pipeline, which has been offline since January.
“We are waiting for the oil, the rest is fairy tales,” Orbán said upon arrival. Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten called the veto “unacceptable,” while Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said Orbán was “using Ukraine as a weapon in his election campaign.”
Twenty-five of the 27 EU member states endorsed the summit’s final statement on Ukraine, with Hungary and its ally, Slovakia, the holdouts. Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever raised the prospect that the EU might wait until after Hungary’s election to implement the loan. Leaders agreed to revisit the matter at their next meeting, scheduled for late April.
Citing European security officials, the Washington Post published an investigation on March 22 claiming that Szijjártó had been calling Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during breaks at EU meetings to brief him on the discussions and possible decisions under consideration.
“Every single EU meeting for years has basically had Moscow behind the table,” one official told the newspaper. The same investigation reported that Russian secret services had proposed staging a fake assassination attempt against Orbán ahead of Hungary’s April 12 elections to bolster his support, according to European intelligence sources.
Szijjártó dismissed the report the same day as “fake news” and “senseless conspiracy theories,” accusing Ukraine and its domestic allies of fabricating the story to influence Hungary’s election.
The foreign minister has made 16 official visits to Moscow since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, most recently on March 4, when he met President Vladimir Putin. Incidentally, the same day the investigation was published, EU diplomats confirmed to the Kyiv Independent that member states had begun holding sensitive meetings without Hungary’s participation, citing concerns that Budapest may have transmitted information from EU sessions to Moscow.
Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski addressed Szijjártó directly on social media, writing that “this would explain a lot.” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the account “shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone,” adding that the allegations explained why he chooses to speak “only when strictly necessary” at EU meetings. Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyar, whose Tisza Party leads some polls by 14 percentage points, labeled the reported conduct as “outright treason.”
On March 23, European Commission spokeswoman Anitta Hipper said Brussels expected Budapest to provide clarifications.
“A relationship of trust between member states, and between them and the institution, is fundamental for the work of the EU,” Hipper stated. A German foreign ministry spokesman described the allegations as “very serious,” saying confidential EU discussions can’t “tolerate any violation.”
Orbán responded the same day by ordering the Ministry of Justice to investigate what he characterized as the wiretapping of Szijjártó’s phone, framing the Washington Post’s sourcing as evidence that someone had been monitoring his foreign minister’s calls.
“The wiretapping of a government member is a serious attack on Hungary. I have instructed the Minister of Justice to investigate the information regarding the wiretapping of Péter Szijjártó,” Orbán stated.
At a campaign rally on the evening of March 23, Szijjártó openly admitted to speaking to his counterparts in non-EU states both before and after EU foreign affairs meetings, according to Politico.
“I speak not only with the Russian foreign minister, but also with the U.S., the Turkish, the Israeli, the Serbian ones, and our other partners before and after the meetings of the Council of the European Union,” the minister said.
“The situation is that many decisions are being made in the European Union that influence the relations and cooperation of Hungary with other countries outside the EU,” Szijjártó said, before adding, “That’s what foreign policy is about.”
Government spokesman Zoltán Kovács released an audio recording in which journalist Szabolcs Panyi acknowledges providing Szijjártó’s phone number to the intelligence service of another EU member state.
“I gave them two numbers [.…] they also see these two,” Panyi says in the recording, describing a system tracking who contacts the minister and when. Panyi declines to identify which country’s service was involved. Szijjártó said he was “shocked” to learn his phone had been monitored and pointed to Panyi’s reported links to the opposition Tisza Party as evidence of a coordinated campaign against the government.
The revelations arrived against a backdrop established by a Financial Times investigation published on March 11, which reported that the Kremlin had approved a plan by the Social Design Agency, already under Western sanctions, to flood Hungarian social media with covert pro-Orbán content, portraying him as the only leader capable of defending Hungary’s sovereignty while depicting Magyar as a “Brussels puppet.”
According to a campaign planning document obtained by the FT, the agency had been reviewing Hungarian news publications since February and had identified around 50 pro-government figures to amplify its messaging.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of March 27, 2026.
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