BUDAPESH
War-torn Ukraine “will stop at nothing” to prevent Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party winning the upcoming Hungarian elections, the Hungarian government claims.
Physical violence against the prime minister and his family, and attacks or sabotage of key energy installations, are being prepared, ministers allege.
The Ukrainian government, in turn, accuses its Hungarian counterpart of whipping up a hate campaign against it to frighten Hungarians into voting Fidesz back into office.
The Financial Times reported on Wednesday morning that the Social Design Agency, a Kremlin-linked media consultancy firm, was preparing a mass disinformation campaign in Hungary, to bolster Orbán and discredit the opposition Tisza Party and its leader, Peter Magyar.
With just 30 days to go until the parliamentary election in Hungary, some analysts believe the anti-Ukraine hysteria proves that Orbán is panicking in the face of probable defeat. At the core of the dispute is the disruption of the Druzhba (Friendship) pipeline on which Hungarian and Hungarian-run Slovak refineries depend.
Oil deliveries through the pipeline stopped on 27 January, after a Russian drone strike caused a fire at the Brody oil hub in western Ukraine. Last week, Orbán produced satellite images which, according to him, show that the pipeline is intact. He and his ministers accuse Ukraine of delaying repairs, in order to harm Orban’s re-election chances, by causing a fuel shortage in Hungary.
“The Orbán government is not telling the full truth,” András Rácz a security analyst, at the German Council on Foreign Relations, told the BBC, regarding Hungarian government claims that no technical obstacles remain to restarting the flow of Russian oil to Hungary.
In the 27 January Russian attack, Rácz said, an oil tank containing 75 million litres of crude oil at Brody was damaged, and to save the oil and prevent an environmental disaster, it was pumped into the pipeline for storage. The presence of that oil, and other technical damage resulting from the first and a subsequent Russian attack, prevent the restoration of supply.
