Goulash: With Orbán Out, Oligarchs Try to Protect Assets; Dirty Secrets of the Chad Mission

FRESH FROM VSQUARE

​​HOW THE KREMLIN TURNED A MAGA INFLUENCER TRIP INTO AN INFLUENCE OPERATION

VSquare and Romania’s Context.ro reveal how a 10-day trip to Moldova and Moscow by MAGA influencers — led by Charles Bausman, a Capitol insurrection participant turned Moscow-based propagandist — was weaponized by a Russian digital interference operation ahead of Moldova’s parliamentary elections. The trip was facilitated by the Moscow Patriarchate and included meetings with senior Russian state and church figures. Footage of the trip was then amplified by Salt and Light, a network linked to fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor, which framed the elections as a battle for Orthodox faith. There is no evidence the influencers knowingly participated — but their ties to Kremlin-linked figures run deep. Read the investigation here.

HOW INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM OUTLASTED THE ORBÁN REGIME

VSquare editor-in-chief Anna Gielewska reflects on what Orbán’s defeat means for the independent journalists, NGOs, and watchdogs who survived 16 years of propaganda, underfunding, and “foreign agent” smears to keep exposing the regime. She credits a generational shift — young Hungarians who grew up under Orbánism and finally had enough — and argues that our Kremlin Hotline investigation, showing Szijjártó acting as Lavrov’s servant, resonated with them – unlike Orbán’s propaganda. But her note of caution is worth heeding: Slovakia shows how quickly post-authoritarian euphoria can fade and how capably the old guard can make a triumphant return. Read the commentary here. 

ORBÁN’S SPYING KIT REVEALED: ISRAELI SURVEILLANCE TOOL COMBINED WITH HUNGARIAN TECHNOLOGY

VSquare and Citizen Lab reveal that Hungarian intelligence has been secretly deploying Webloc, a mass geolocation surveillance system tracking hundreds of millions of people via smartphone advertising data — making Hungary the first confirmed EU country to use the tool, in likely violation of GDPR. Licenses were procured through SCI-Network Ltd., a broker company with alleged ties to minister Antal Rogán. The license renewals were completed in March 2026 — weeks before the April 12 elections. Read it here, and Citizen Lab’s full paper here. After our investigation was published, Hungary’s data protection authority responded — see below in our scoops section!

KREMLIN HOTLINE: HUNGARY COLLUDED WITH RUSSIA TO DELIST SANCTIONED OLIGARCHS, COMPANIES AND BANKS

The investigation that shook Hungary’s election campaign. VSquare, Frontstory, Delfi Estonia, The Insider, and ICJK obtained transcripts and audio recordings of secret phone calls between Hungarian FM Péter Szijjártó and Russian FM Sergey Lavrov — in which Szijjártó promised to delist Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov’s sanctioned sister from the EU list, briefed Lavrov on confidential EU foreign ministers’ meetings, and told Russia’s deputy energy minister he was doing his best to “repeal” an entire EU sanctions package and save as many Russian entities as possible. Former Lithuanian FM Landsbergis put it more bluntly: “Every generation has a Kim Philby. Apparently Péter Szijjártó is playing the role with enthusiasm.” Read it on VSquare, Frontstory, Delfi Estonia, The Insider and ICJK.

KREMLIN HOTLINE: HOW HUNGARY COORDINATES WITH RUSSIA BLOCKING UKRAINE FROM THE EU

Part two of our joint investigation shows Szijjártó secretly coordinating Viktor Orbán’s Moscow visit with Lavrov before telling EU allies, offering to send EU documents through Hungary’s Moscow embassy, weaponizing Hungarian minority rights in Ukraine as a Kremlin-aligned talking point, and congratulating Lavrov on the Alaska summit results while EU ambassadors were being briefed on their failure. “I am always at your disposal,” Szijjártó told Lavrov. He apparently meant it. Read the second part here.

SPICY SCOOPS

There is always a lot of information that we hear and find interesting and newsworthy but don’t publish as part of our investigative reporting — and share instead in this newsletter. 

HUNGARY’S DATA PROTECTION AUTHORITY OPENS INVESTIGATION INTO WEBLOC MASS SURVEILLANCE TOOL

VSquare and Citizen Lab’s investigation revealed that Hungarian intelligence agencies have been secretly using Webloc, a mass geolocation surveillance system developed by Israeli-American firm Cobwebs Technologies. Webloc works by harvesting location data collected by smartphone apps for advertising purposes—tracking the movements of hundreds of millions of people through their devices’ unique advertising identifiers, without their knowledge or consent. It allows intelligence agencies to geofence specific areas, reconstruct individuals’ movements from historical data points, and link digital identities to physical locations in near real time. In the EU, using personal and advertising data for government surveillance in this way is widely considered to violate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which strictly limits how such data can be processed and shared.

A week after our report, Hungary’s data protection authority informed me that it is taking action. Dr. Attila Péterfalvi, president of the National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (NAIH), stated that the authority “had no prior knowledge of the above-mentioned tool and its alleged use by Hungarian authorities” before receiving my press inquiry—meaning Hungary’s intelligence agencies had been operating a GDPR-violating mass surveillance system for years without the country’s own data protection regulator being aware of it. Péterfalvi confirmed that no complaint or notification had ever been submitted to the authority on the matter and announced that, on the basis of our reporting, “the Authority is initiating an ex officio investigation” into the use of Webloc in Hungary. It is worth noting that the reply arrived days after Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat, at a time when other formerly government-influenced institutions have suddenly started to do their jobs.

ORBÁN’S OLIGARCHS TRY TO SPIRIT WEALTH ABROAD AS THE REGIME DISINTEGRATES

The scale of Fidesz’s defeat — and the supermajority won by Péter Magyar’s Tisza party — has sent shockwaves through the Orbán regime’s economic empire. Those with the most to lose, including their personal freedom, are not waiting to find out what the incoming government intends to do. According to multiple Hungarian government-connected sources, key oligarchs and regime stooges are scrambling to move their wealth out of Hungary before Magyar’s government can freeze, seize or nationalize it. Private jets are reportedly being used to carry cash and other valuables to destinations across the Middle East. One well-known regime stooge is alleged by sources to have sent or invested hundreds of billions of forints in Saudi Arabia. Other destinations include the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states, as well as — for an older generation of oligarchs — Singapore and Hong Kong. A separate group of government cronies, implicated in a large-scale corruption case, are alleged by one source with knowledge of their plans to be eyeing a move to Australia.

The picture that emerges is of a regime in full panic mode — one that spent 16 years building a system of politically directed wealth accumulation and is now frantically trying to shield the proceeds from accountability. At the same time, sources suggest the incoming government may have more help than expected in tracing what was taken and where it went: many working inside the government bureaucracy and law enforcement have partial knowledge of what happened under Orbán, and are likely to cooperate with the new government — setting the stage for what could be years-long efforts to recover allegedly stolen public wealth and arrest those who committed financial crimes. It’s worth noting that Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia or the UAE do not have extradition treaties with Hungary, and while there is one with Israel, it usually does not extradite its own citizens easily — including, in this case, Hungarian–Israeli dual citizens. And, as long as the Trump administration is in power, even the United States could become a safe haven for the top echelons of the Orbán regime, according to my sources.

HUNGARY’S CHAD MISSION LEFT A TRAIL OF SUSPICIOUS PAYMENTS — AND SOMEONE IS NOW DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE

Captain Szilveszter Pálinkás, once the public face of Hungary’s military recruitment campaigns, gave a bombshell interview to Telex in the final weeks of the election campaign, revealing that Gáspár Orbán — the prime minister’s son and a junior lieutenant with no strategic authority — was indeed the driving force behind Hungary’s planned deployment of 200 soldiers to Chad. According to Pálinkás, Gáspár Orbán told him that God had commanded him to save African Christians, and that Orbán’s son calculated a 50% casualty rate — around 100 dead soldiers — as an acceptable price for Hungary to gain combat experience. As we previously reported, Orbán’s son had attended multiple meetings with Chadian and Nigerien officials as part of the mission’s preparation, going to considerable lengths to conceal his identity from cameras.

Now, according to Hungarian government-connected sources, the Chad adventure poses serious risks for some of those involved — for reasons the Hungarian public has not yet heard. Money that originated in Hungary was allegedly spent on expensive gifts (such as luxury watches) and sometimes even cash payments handed directly to influential local stakeholders in Chad and other African countries in the neighborhood — a method commonly used by countries such as Russia and China to buy influence in Africa, but one that is quite questionable for an EU member state. One source also alleged that some of the money was routed through a fund tied to specific intelligence operations. Most alarmingly, some documents and other evidence related to these expenditures in Chad were allegedly already being destroyed before the April 12 election —  suggesting that those involved knew exactly what accountability might look like under a new government. (The Hungarian government didn’t reply to my request for comment.)

MORE FROM OUR PARTNERS

If you like our scoops and stories, here are some more articles from our partners!

THE FRENCH PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE IS INVESTIGATING FORMER SMER MEMBER STROMČEK. HE ALSO TRANSFERRED ADDITIONAL SUSPICIOUS MILLIONS AFTER LEAVING POLITICS. According to the Investigative Center of Ján Kuciak (ICJK), French prosecutors are examining former Smer state secretary Viktor Stromček’s villas on the Côte d’Azur over possible illicit funding amid related Norwegian money-laundering probes involving his business partners and newly uncovered suspicious financial flows through foreign companies after he left politics. (Text in Slovak.)

EXPERTS STAMPING FAKES: HOW THE MARKET FOR FRAUDULENT ART CERTIFICATES WORKS. Investigace.cz reporters bought a provably fake painting on the Czech auction platform Aukro, then went undercover to obtain authenticity certificates for it — and got them, without difficulty, from both a court-certified expert and an art historian. The investigation exposes a booming market for rubber-stamped forgeries: up to 80% of art sold online may be fake, and two prolific experts have issued positive certificates on paintings later confirmed as forgeries by the families of the artists themselves. (Text in Czech.)

PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE SERVICE LINKED TO MINISTER ANTAL ROGÁN MAY HAVE BEEN SPYING ON THE TISZA PARTY. Átlátszó reveals a private shadow intelligence unit built around a former secret service officer, staffed by blackmailable hackers and ex-intelligence officers and producing opposition-smearing material for government propaganda since 2021 — with Tisza Party as its latest target. Read it in Hungarian and English.

“HE WHISPERS IN THE PRIME MINISTER’S EAR”: INSIDE JÁNOS LÁZÁR’S EXILE AND RETURN. Direkt36 reconstructs how Fidesz politician János Lázár was humiliated and sidelined by Viktor Orbán in 2018 after being suspected of harboring prime ministerial ambitions, and how he spent four years rebuilding his position through businessman Lőrinc Mészáros’s lobbying and relentless cultivation of Orbán — and to become the regime’s most dominant campaign figure in 2026, only to go down with it. (In Hungarian and English.)

DESSERT AND FURTHER READINGS

For those still hungry for more, we’re finishing today’s menu with a couple of recommendations from our friends and colleagues.

REFORM OR REPEAT: THE BATTLE FOR HUNGARY’S MEDIA FUTURE BEGINS NOW. Veronika Munk lays out what the incoming Magyar government must do — and avoid — to rebuild Hungary’s grotesquely distorted media landscape: end the weaponization of state advertising; shut down the Sovereignty Protection Office; don’t reintroduce the advertising tax, and overhaul public broadcasting with genuine structural independence rather than just swapping one set of loyalists for another. Follow the newsletter here.

HUNGARY IS POISED TO TOPPLE AN AUTHORITARIAN LEADER. AMERICAN JEWS HAVE SOMETHING TO LEARN. VSquare’s Emily Tamkin in The Forward traces how Orbán deployed antisemitism as a political tool across his 16 years — from Soros conspiracy theories to Zelenskyy campaign posters evoking the “happy merchant” meme — arguing that the essential lesson is always the same: antisemitism wielded by powerful people is a deflection, a way to trick citizens out of asking what their government has actually done for them. The parallel with Trump is explicit and pointed. Read it here.

​​UKRAINE’S ANSWER TO THE PATRIOT PROBLEM: BUILD SOMETHING CHEAPER, AND BUILD IT FAST. How We Cee It looks at Ukraine’s bid to develop a homegrown Patriot alternative — targeting an intercept cost below $1 million versus several million per Patriot missile — with a 2027 deployment target. Experts say it won’t match Patriot’s capability but could reach 70-80% effectiveness at a third of the cost. Check it out here.

UNMASKING THE “NARVA PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC.” Estonian investigative journalist Holger Roonemaa writes of how his colleague, Martin Laine, infiltrated the Telegram group behind the “Narva People’s Republic” separatist campaign that briefly generated alarmed headlines across European media — and found it was not a GRU operation but the handiwork of a St. Petersburg National Bolshevik activist with no connection to Narva whatsoever. Not a single Narva resident agreed to put up a separatist poster. The real story, the post argues, is how easily Western media amplified a nothing-burger into a NATO crisis. Follow The Baltic Flank newsletter here.

MOLDOVA FORMALLY LEAVES THE CIS — AND OTHER DEVELOPMENTS. David Smith’s Moldova Matters newsletter rounds up a busy week, during which Moldova’s parliament formally renounced its CIS membership, citing Russia’s invasions of Georgia and Ukraine. A good digest of a country navigating EU accession while managing Russian pressure on multiple fronts .Follow the newsletter here.

This was VSquare’s 63rd Goulash newsletter. I hope you gobbled it up. Come back soon for another serving. 

Still hungry? Check the previous newsletter issues here! 

SZABOLCS PANYI & THE VSQUARE TEAM