Ukrainian authorities claim to have busted a Hungarian spy ring operating on its territory, alleging that Budapest was collecting sensitive military data with one eye on a possible future incursion into the west of the country.
Hungary’s foreign minister dismissed the accusations as “propaganda”, but the allegations will further test already fraught relations between the two neighbouring countries. While Hungary is a member of Nato and the EU, its prime minister,Viktor Orbán, has been an outlier among European leaders, strongly critical of Kyiv and neutral towards Russia.
The Security Service ofUkraine(SBU) said it had detained two Ukrainian military veterans as part of the operation, and claimed the network had engaged in the collection of information on military defences in the western part of Ukraine as well as sentiment among the local population. It published a video interrogation of one of the detainees in handcuffs, with his face blurred.
The SBU said the spy ring was run by a “staff officer of Hungarian military intelligence” and that the operation was designed to uncover information about vulnerabilities in Ukraine’s defence of western regions.
It claimed that one of the detainees, a 40-year-old veteran from the western Ukrainian town of Berehove, which has a majority ethnic Hungarian population, had been recruited in 2021 as a sleeper agent. It said he was “activated” by a handler in 2024 and asked to collect information. It alleged that at a meeting inHungarythe man received cash payment for providing information, as well as to help recruit more people to the network of informants.
“By forming an agent network, foreign intelligence hoped to expand the range of information collection, including obtaining data from frontline and frontline regions,” the SBU said.
The two detained suspects face charges of high treason, which could result in life imprisonment.
Speaking at a press conference in Budapest, the foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, said Hungary had not been presented with any evidence to back up the claims: “If we receive any details or official information, then we will be able to deal with this. Until then, I must classify this as propaganda that must be handled with caution.”
An estimated 80,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine’s western Zakarpattia region. The language rights of the region’s people have long been a bone of contention: Orbán’s nationalist government says Kyiv does not make proper provisions for them to speak Hungarian in schools, while Ukraine has accused Orbán of instrumentalising the community as an excuse to follow Russian talking points about Ukraine and the war.
Orbán has spoken out against continued sanctions on Russia and promised to block Ukraine’s EU accession route. Last summer, he infuriated other EU leaders when hevisited Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin, shortly after Hungary took over the rotating EU presidency.
Although no Hungarian government official has spoken openly about trying to seize territory from Ukraine, it is sometimes a topic of far-right discussion in the country. Russian state television has also frequently suggested Ukraine could fall apart, with Russia taking over the east of the country and Poland and Hungary dividing the western part.
In some Hungarian-majority villages, the clocks are set to Budapest time and the most popular television channel is the Hungarian government-controlled M1, which often sharply criticises Ukrainian authorities and parrots Russian narratives. Many local people say they feel closer to Budapest than to Kyiv.
László Zubánics, a history professor and the head of the Hungarian Democratic Federation in Ukraine,said in 2023that it was a stereotype that ethnic Hungarians were not Ukrainian patriots, and said up to 400 were then fighting on the frontline and about 30 had been killed in action. However, he admitted that for many in the community, trying to balance the competing demands of Budapest and Kyiv was “like trying to dance along a tightrope”.