Goulash: Hungary’s Military Spy Agency Hunts Leakers; From Diplomat to Pro-Kremlin Influencer

FRESH FROM VSQUARE

ARTUR MEETS RUSSIA: HOW A FORMER POLISH DIPLOMAT BECAME A PRO-KREMLIN INFLUENCER

Poland now has its very own answer to “Sasha Meets Russia”: a red-haired ex-diplomat named Artur Siejka who wanders Moscow’s Rolls-Royce showrooms, snow-melting stations, and Victory Day parades for tens of thousands of Polish YouTube subscribers, resolutely refusing to notice the small fact of the war going on next door. Frontstory.pl traces his path from Polish trade attaché in Beijing to Moscow-based vlogger whose channel keeps popping up on Russia Today’s own promotional train — and asks the million dollar question: who exactly funds a Western influencer’s life in the world’s most expensive sanctioned capital? Read the investigation here.

WE OBTAINED THE FILES BEHIND HUNGARY’S HUF 125 BILLION GOVERNMENT ADVERTISING GOLD MINE

Átlátszó fought a multi-year FOI lawsuit up to Hungary’s Supreme Court, only to be handed five USB drives of PDFs so scanned, printed and rotated that AI was needed to make the numbers readable. Inside: documentation on at least €234 million of public money flowing through a pro-government ad empire to a cast of intermediaries collecting 15 percent commissions, with the communist-era “banned, tolerated, supported” logic dutifully applied to independent newsrooms. Read the story here.

EUROPEAN PASSWORD MANAGER SHARES ORIGINS AND UPDATES WITH STATE-CERTIFIED RUSSIAN FIRM

Passwork, a Spain-based password manager proudly branded “Made in EU,” turns out to share its codebase, founders, and update pipeline with a Russian counterpart that counts sanctioned missile manufacturers as clients and holds certifications from the FSB and Russia’s Defense Ministry. OCCRP, Frontstory, and partners explore how the digital keys to Europe’s public sector ended up quietly synchronized with Arkhangelsk. Check it out.

BABIŠ, ORBÁN, AND AGROFERT’S LUCRATIVE BUSINESS IN HUNGARY

Investigace.cz’s Barbora Šturmová traces how Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s Agrofert group quietly thrived in Orbán’s Hungary — collecting millions in subsidies, taking loans of up to €71 million from a bank co-owned by Orbán’s childhood friend Lőrinc Mészáros, and buying into a Romanian venture linked to two of Orbán’s former ministers. Read it here.

A POLICE HQ, WIND FARMS, AND NATURAL GAS: MAPPING CHINA’S INVESTMENTS IN EUROPE

Through an eclectic network of shell companies and holding firms, the agency that manages China’s foreign reserves has quietly acquired stakes in a Brussels police headquarters, Scottish wind farms, a Madrid gas distributor, Polish Amazon logistics centers, and — for good measure — buildings in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. A joint investigation by OCCRP, VSquare, Frontstory and partners. Read the investigation here.

AS ORBÁN-ALLIED THINK TANK IS DISMANTLED, LEADERS SHOP ITS NETWORK TO MAGA

For over a decade, the state-funded Danube Institute served as Orbán’s Castle Hill salon for Transatlantic Christian conservatives — housing well-paid international fellows in a luxurious villa and dressing Budapest up as the global capital of anti-globalism. With the money now cut off by a Magyar government–appointed commissioner, its leadership has quietly set up a Virginia-registered “Danube Institute USA” — represented, as it happens, by Elon Musk’s lawyer’s firm — to keep the party going on MAGA money. Read it here.

FROM PROPAGANDA TO THE COURTROOM: HOW RUSSIA IS BUILDING A LEGAL CASE AGAINST THE BALTIC STATES

Moscow’s familiar claims that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are secretly Nazi states persecuting their Russian speakers are being repackaged into a case-in-preparation before the UN’s International Court of Justice — what Latvian security services now call “lawfare.” Re:Baltica, Delfi and LRT trace how a Moscow law firm with FSB pedigree has been enlisting Kremlin-tied propagandists to build it. Check it out.

INVESTIGATING THE ORBÁN ERA AND SURVIVING ITS ATTACKS: ÁTLÁTSZÓ AT 15

Hungary’s pioneering nonprofit investigative newsroom — an outlet that broke stories on the Orbán-Mészáros business empire, their yachts and private jets, all while enduring police raids, smear campaigns, and a stint as the Sovereignty Protection Office’s inaugural target— turned 15 this summer. I interviewed founder Tamás Bodoky on how they survived and what’s next for them now that Orbán is out of power. Read it 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 TO SEND HAVEL’S FRIEND AND TRANSLATOR BACK TO PRAGUE AS AMBASSADOR

After 16 years of Orbán turning Hungarian foreign policy into a lobbying firm for hire by Russia, China and other authoritarian clients, Péter Magyar’s government is signaling that “Hungary is back” — and few appointments say that more clearly than the one I’ve heard for Prague. Multiple sources following Hungarian-Czech relations, as well as sources inside the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, have told me that György Varga is being sent to the Czech capital as Hungary’s next ambassador. It’s like bringing back Harrison Ford to play Indiana Jones for the fourth and fifth time, or Michael Keaton to play Batman again in cameos (and, of course, let’s not forget about how great Birdman was).

Varga, born in Budapest in 1954, is arguably the single most senior Czech expert in Hungary’s diplomatic corps. A Bohemist by training — he studied Czech at ELTE — he moved through the Czech dissident milieu in the 1970s and 1980s as a literary translator of Václav Havel, Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera and Ivan Klíma, smuggling banned émigré books across the Iron Curtain along the way. He became a personal friend of Havel’s, who reportedly described him as his “window into Hungary.” Between 1988 and 1990, Varga covered the collapse of communism as a Budapest correspondent of Radio Free Europe’s Czech Section. More importantly, Prime Minister József Antall then made him Hungary’s first post-communist ambassador in Prague, a post he held from 1990 to 1995 — through the Velvet Divorce and the birth of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The rest of his career reads like a full tour of Hungarian cultural diplomacy in the region: director of the Central European Department at the MFA (1998–2000), Consul General in Košice (2000–2004), director of the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Prague (2005–2010), and Deputy Executive Director of the International Visegrad Fund in Bratislava (2014–2017). (Hungarian speakers should listen to this interview, while Czechs should check this one with Varga.)

The selection of Varga is revealing in two ways. On the one hand, sending Havel’s translator back to Prague — three decades after he was first accredited there — is a piece of diplomatic theatre almost too perfect to script, and fits the Magyar government’s message that Hungary has rejoined the West and returned to the founding spirit of the Visegrad cooperation. On the other, bringing a 72-year-old ambassador out of retirement to take one of Central Europe’s most important postings (and one he already occupied in 1990) also lays bare the severe HR crisis facing Hungarian diplomacy after the Orbán-Szijjártó years.

The Warsaw pick tells a somewhat similar story. Foreign Minister Anita Orbán has nominated Miklós Mitrovits, a 48-year-old Polish studies scholar and historian, as Hungary’s next ambassador to Warsaw — another symbolically loaded appointment aimed at resetting and de-politicizing the Polish-Hungarian relationship after Orbán’s alliance with the opposition Law and Justice party soured it under Donald Tusk’s government. Like Varga in Prague, Mitrovits is a scholar rather than a career diplomat: another sign that Anita Orbán is reaching for expertise outside a foreign ministry hollowed out over 16 years of Fideszification.

HUNGARIAN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE’S NEW ENEMY: JOURNALISTS’ SOURCES

Just last week, German authorities confirmed that the explosive drone found next to a Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle Airport on August 4 bore the unmistakable hallmarks of Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU — making it likely the latest in a rapidly escalating Russian hybrid campaign against Europe that now spans undersea cable sabotage in the Baltic, arson at European logistics hubs and factories supplying Ukraine, and drone incursions along NATO’s eastern flank. Behind most of these operations, Western agencies can spot the fingerprints of the GRU. And EU military intelligence services are, by their own accounts, on higher alert than at any point in the postwar era. 

In Central Europe, however, there is a long and unfortunate history of military intelligence resources being redirected toward very different targets. The most notorious recent case is the 2013 Nečas–Nagyová scandal in the Czech Republic, when Prime Minister Petr Nečas’s chief of staff and lover, Jana Nagyová, was accused of abusing Czech Military Intelligence to surveil Nečas’s estranged wife — allegedly to pressure her or accelerate the divorce. The scandal ultimately brought down Nečas’s whole government, and arguably paved the way for the rise of Andrej Babiš.

Now let’s head south to Budapest, where, apparently, enemies just as sinister as estranged wives and rival lovers are threatening the country’s national security. According to multiple sources familiar with the inner workings of KNBSZ, Hungary’s military intelligence service, the appointment of Attila Szuvák as interim head of the agency by Péter Magyar’s government was met with a mix of shock and disbelief inside the service and across the army. In a series of articles this summer, Hungarian weekly HVG detailed why: sources from the army and the service described Szuvák as underqualified for the job, and revealed that while serving as Hungarian military attaché in Algeria, Szuvák had allegedly searched the office of the Hungarian ambassador without authorization. After protests from the ambassador and the MFA, Szuvák was recalled and quietly pushed aside. Besides unearthing this damning information, HVG also revealed that the Hungarian president’s office refused to promote Szuvák to the rank of general. Guess what happened after the articles revealing that the military intelligence chief was snooping on an ambassador appeared? My sources tell me that KNBSZ was ordered to use its own resources — including limited intelligence-gathering and surveillance capabilities that Szuvák himself can authorize without a warrant from a judge or a minister — to snoop on nearly 20 people, current and former officers, suspected of being sources for the articles. Old habits, as they say, die hard.

The incident also lays bare, once again, the HR struggle of the new Hungarian government, which is even reaching for a discarded, reprimanded officer in order to find someone for the top of a sensitive agency who wasn’t compromised by carrying out political hit jobs for Orbán. It also shows how using intelligence methods to reveal journalists’ sources has been completely normalized under Orbán, creating a routine that survives his fall. KNBSZ and the Ministry of Defense did not reply to requests for comment.

MORE FROM OUR PARTNERS

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

“FIND OUT IF YOUR PARTNER IS BREAKING YOUR HEART”: CONTROVERSIAL STALKERWARE WITH LUKASHENKO-LINKED FOUNDER HAS A COMPANY AND BANK ACCOUNTS IN PRAGUE. Investigace.cz traces how mSpy — the notorious phone-spying app founded by Belarusian businessman Andrei Simanovich, son-in-law of Lukashenko confidant Viktor Sheiman — hides behind Czech company Altercon Group, complete with Prague bank accounts collecting payments from customers pitched on catching cheating spouses. (Text in Czech.) 

HOW SLOVAKIA’S ANTI-WIND MOVEMENT GREW: TIES TO EXTREMISTS AND POLITICIANS BROUGHT ITS LEADER MONEY — AND MAY HAVE EVEN SWAYED THE GOVERNMENT. ICJK traces how esoterica salesman Daniel Máčovský’s local anti-wind-farm activism scaled up into a national movement — powered by far-right figures, and revenues that shot from red ink to tens of thousands of euros as it grew, apparently even shaping government policy along the way. (Text in Slovak.) 

STARVATION LED TO SEXUAL ABUSE AT A CHILDREN’S HOME — HERE ARE THE ORBÁN GOVERNMENT’S CONCEALED CHILD PROTECTION REPORTS. Direkt36 sued its way to the confidential 2024 inspection reports the Orbán government commissioned and buried. The lawsuit’s results reveal mold, darkness, staff shortages, and one children’s home where kids submitted to sexual abuse by peers in exchange for food after 6:30 p.m. (Text in English and Hungarian.) 

ACCORDING TO THE MOTHER OF THE ALLEGED KIDNAPPER, AN ONLINE ROMANCE LED TO THE DANISH GIRL’S TRIP TO HUNGARY. After a 15-year-old Danish girl was reported missing and later found in a village in eastern Hungary, Átlátszó tracked down the mother of the 22-year-old man arrested for kidnapping. (Text in English and Hungarian.) 

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.

POLISH DRONE PLANT FIRE “UNDOUBTEDLY ARSON” AND LIKELY ORDERED BY RUSSIA, SAYS TUSK. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters that a fire at a Polish drone manufacturing plant was “undoubtedly” arson and, in his assessment, most probably ordered by Russia — the latest addition to the growing catalogue of GRU-linked sabotage across the region. Notes From Poland’s summary.

THE KREMLIN’S ESCALATION OF A HYBRID WAR AGAINST EUROPE. EK Strategic Communications Center on how Moscow has moved from testing the West’s resolve to an openly escalating hybrid campaign — sabotage, drone incursions, arson and cyberattacks now converging into a sustained pressure campaign against European infrastructure.

STATE DUMA ELECTIONS: THE ILLUSION OF STABILITY AMID A CRISIS OF PUBLIC TRUST IN THE KREMLIN. Another analysis by EK Strategic Communications Center on the Kremlin’s preparations for the 2026 State Duma elections — a carefully managed exercise in projecting stability that increasingly can’t disguise the erosion of public trust underneath.

ESTONIA’S SPY CHIEF WANTS EUROPE TO FIND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THESE PICTURES. Estonia’s foreign intelligence chief lays out how the Kremlin’s playbook against the Baltics mirrors its pre-invasion moves against Ukraine, and urges Europe to stop pretending the pattern isn’t repeating.

HUNGARIAN POLITICIANS ACTED AS A TROJAN HORSE WITHIN THE EU. Dutch investigative outlet Follow the Money’s summer podcast takes a closer look at our Kremlin Hotline investigation, with VSquare’s Anna Gielewska discussing the intercepted conversations that exposed the unusually close relationship between Moscow and Budapest. Their verdict? “It was a spy thriller, with one difference: this actually happened.”

GREASY LIES: FOOD CRISES AS FUEL FOR CHINESE AND RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION. Visegrad Insight maps how Beijing and Moscow have turned Europe’s food-safety scares — from Polish butter shortages to Czech methanol panic — into a reliable propaganda staple, blending genuine consumer anxiety with familiar anti-Western narratives.

This was VSquare’s 70th 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