What’s Poland’s Role In The “Battle For Hungary”?

Tusk and Sikorski might have used the latter’s wife to plant the story about Szijjarto in the Washington Post and might have either been the ones who wiretapped him or at least knew about this through Sikorski’s ties with the journalist who passed along his number to a foreign intelligence agency.

RT has published an ongoing series about the “Battle for Hungary” ahead of its next parliamentary elections on 12 April. There are three installments thus far: “How the EU plans to defeat Viktor Orban”, “How the Russiagate blueprint has been unleashed against Orban”, and “The Ukraine connection”. In brief, the EU and Ukraine are predictably meddling, and one of the several forms that this has thus far taken is working through their media proxies to misportray Orban’s government as Russian puppets.

“The Russiagate blueprint” was introduced by the Washington Post in a recent article where they alleged that “(Peter) Szijjarto, the foreign minister, made regular phone calls during breaks at E.U. meetings to provide his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with ‘live reports on what’s been discussed’ and possible solutions, one of the European security officials said.” The decontextualized innuendo is that he was blatantly functioning for years as a de facto Russian intelligence asset inside the EU.

He then defended himself by explaining that “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. That’s what foreign policy is about. Perhaps I’m saying something rough, but diplomacy is about us talking to leaders of other countries.” That’s reasonable, but average members of society without any knowledge of diplomacy mistakenly consider it scandalous, ergo the effectiveness of this provocation.

According to the Brussels Signal, Poland might have planted this story in the Washington Post through Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski’s wife, Anne Applebaum, who used to be one of their contributors and is a long-time critic of Orban. Zlotan Kovacs, the Hungarian leader’s spokesman, lent credence to this hypothesis by retweeting their article and therefore raising maximum awareness of it. About Hungary, a patriotic media outlet, then reported on Poland’s ties to the journalist that helped wiretap Szijjarto:

“The Polish dimension extends beyond institutional ties. (Szabolcs) Panyi’s work is regularly amplified within Polish political and media circles, and his content is frequently shared by Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, a key figure aligned with the same liberal international networks and husband of another known Orbánophobe, Anne Applebaum. This visible alignment places Panyi within a broader regional ecosystem where media narratives and political agendas reinforce one another.”

Right after the scandal broke, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk tweeted that “The news that Orbán’s people inform Moscow about EU Council meetings in every detail shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. We’ve had our suspicions about that for a long time. That’s one reason why I take the floor only when strictly necessary and say just as much as necessary.” Like Sikorski, he too hates Orban, so it’s possible that they’re both involved in the “Battle of Hungary” through these two latest provocations.

A credible scenario is that they used Applebaum to plant the story about Szijjarto in the Washington Post and might have either been the country that wiretapped him after Panyi passed along his number or at minimum knew about it but didn’t inform him because they wanted it to spark a major scandal. Their rival, conservative President Karol Nawrocki, and his team would have been kept in the dark about this for fear that they’d inform Orban. It’s only speculation, at least for now, but it surely sounds plausible.