According to Sikorski, money transfers and audio recordings prove cooperation between Moscow and the Orbán government

According to Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, Warsaw has evidence that Russia supported Viktor Orbán's government and worked closely with it. The head of Polish diplomacy spoke about this in a lengthy interview given to Gazeta Wyborcza, in response to a question about whether the European populists enjoying Moscow's backing could be considered the Kremlin's fifth column. He said the evidence exists in the form of money transfers and audio recordings, and that in the latter, his former Hungarian counterpart, Péter Szijjártó, speaks to Sergei Lavrov like a schoolboy, or at least like the Russian foreign minister's subcontractor. Sikorski did not specify which recordings or transfers he meant, and according to HVG and Index, the claim about the transfers is a new element, about which nothing had been known until now. It also remains an open question whether the Polish minister was referring to recordings already made public, or whether Warsaw also has further, previously undisclosed material.

The part about the recordings, however, hardly needs explaining to Hungarian readers, since in the weeks before the April election they became one of the main topics of the campaign. The series began on March 21, when The Washington Post, citing an internal report and Western intelligence officials, wrote that Szijjártó regularly calls Lavrov during breaks in EU meetings and briefs him on the behind-closed-doors negotiations. The paper also published an even more serious claim: that a unit of Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, warned about Orbán's declining popularity and proposed a staged assassination attempt to turn the campaign around. Szijjártó called all this an absurd conspiracy theory, while Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said no one should be surprised that Orbán's people pass information to Russia, and Politico, citing five EU officials, reported that Hungary was starting to be left out of sensitive discussions.

Two days later, the pro-government outlet Mandiner published a secretly recorded conversation involving investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi, accusing him of having helped a foreign intelligence service wiretap Szijjártó. Panyi denied having had anything to do with the wiretapping, and that same day released the transcript of a February 2020 conversation between Szijjártó and Lavrov, which he said had been recorded by the national security service of an EU member state. In the conversation, the Hungarian foreign minister said, ahead of the Slovak election, that it was crucial for Budapest that the coalition in power there continue, and that they trusted the social democrats, i.e. Robert Fico's party, which he said was the only rational force in Slovak politics. He also asked Lavrov to arrange a meeting between the Slovak and Russian prime ministers, to which Lavrov replied: "That's quite a big request, but I'll pass it on to the prime minister." Viktor Orbán and the then governing party called Panyi a traitor to the nation, while Péter Magyar said that if Szijjártó had colluded with Lavrov, it could form the basis of a treason charge - something we are still waiting for.

The next recording came on March 31, published by the Russian opposition outlet The Insider. In this 94-second conversation from August 30, 2024, Lavrov began by saying he was "calling at Alisher's request." This refers to Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, who sent word asking the Hungarian foreign minister to do something about his sister, Gulbahor Ismailova, who had been placed on the EU sanctions list over ownership of the superyacht Dilbar. Szijjártó promised that, together with the Slovaks, they would submit a proposal the following week to remove her from the sanctions list, and that they would do everything possible to succeed - and Ismailova was indeed removed from the list in March 2025. According to EUobserver, one of the most telling moments of the conversation came when Lavrov mentioned that the Russian press was writing a lot about Szijjártó, who anxiously asked in response: "Did I say something wrong?" He ended the call by saying, "I am always at your disposal." Reacting to the recording, Szijjártó only wrote that he was saying the same thing on the phone as he does in public, adding sarcastically: "Nice work!"

The most damning material appeared on April 8, four days before the election. It was published by a consortium of investigative outlets: VSquare, the Polish Frontstory, the Estonian Delfi, The Insider, and Slovakia's Ján Kuciak Investigative Center. According to the transcripts, on December 14, 2023, at the EU summit where the opening of accession talks with Ukraine was decided, Szijjártó stepped out of the room to brief Lavrov on the state of the negotiations, to which Lavrov replied that "sometimes well-intentioned, direct blackmail is the best solution." After the call, Viktor Orbán withdrew his veto and went for a coffee break, while the other 26 leaders voted to open the negotiations, with Szijjártó staying in the room to follow developments. In a conversation from July 2024, during Hungary's EU presidency, Szijjártó - while organizing a meeting between Orbán and Putin in Moscow - spoke about how the visit's significance was heightened by the fact that Orbán held the rotating presidency of the European Union. In the same conversation, he offered to send Lavrov the text of the EU compromise on the linguistic rights of national minorities in Ukraine, via the Hungarian embassy in Moscow: "I'll send it to you, no problem." Szijjártó called the disclosure an unusually crude and open intelligence interference in the Hungarian election. Péter Magyar spoke of an open betrayal of Hungarian and European interests, while Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the recordings were disgraceful, showing not a real conversation but a servile report to Russian patrons, and that they needed to be investigated. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, by contrast, welcomed the disclosure, saying the recordings proved Western, not Russian, interference. The recordings have since also inspired a theatrical production in Estonia.

The election was won by Tisza, and in July Szijjártó announced that he was resigning his parliamentary mandate to take a job at the Chinese carmaker BYD. Police rejected a bribery complaint related to the matter, finding no grounds for suspicion, and in early October the former foreign minister was questioned behind closed doors by parliament's national security committee, where Szijjártó merely said that serious misunderstandings had occurred. Sikorski's interview may now open a new chapter in the affair, since if Warsaw really does have evidence of Russian money transfers, then the material already known - which shows a foreign minister's striking servility - would be compounded by a far more serious question: whether Moscow paid for what it received from the Hungarian government. For now, only the Polish foreign minister is making this claim, and it will remain an open question until the details are made public. The obsequious tone, however, needs no proof, since anyone can listen to it for themselves.

Ugar