The head of Budapest’s public transport was in the way of a Russian metro company’s business, with more than 200 million euros at stake. A KGB-style provokatsiya was utilized to get him fired and force the Hungarian capital to buy malfunctioning and expensive Russian metro cars.
In 2014 Béla Kovács, a notoriously russophile Hungarian member of the European Parliament, dubbed as KGBéla even by his own far-right comrades, broke the law and made illegal contacts with Russian intelligence officers. The story of Kovács is the most accurate depiction of the complicated nature of Russian influence in Hungary. And it’s not that easy to understand what happened to him and today’s political landscape of Hungary.
