Goulash: Hungary’s New Intel Chief Signals Drastic Change; Russian Drone Troubles in Romania

FRESH FROM VSQUARE

DRONE INCURSIONS IN ROMANIA WERE FOLLOWED BY A COORDINATED ONLINE STORM

Two drones, two explosions, one extremely busy week for Romania’s information space. After a Russian Geran-2 crashed into an apartment block in Galați on May 29 and a stray Ukrainian Magura self-detonated in the NATO-adjacent port of Constanța a week later, networks of Facebook pages with a combined reach of tens of millions of followers sprang elegantly into action — pushing the line that the Russian drone was actually Ukrainian, that Putin merely wanted an “objective analysis,” and other warm thoughts. Funky Citizens documented 14,000 posts in 35 hours and coordinated waves running for a full week without any meaningful intervention from the platforms — who, per the Digital Services Act, are theoretically obliged to do something about exactly this. Check out the analysis here.

HUNGARY’S ASBESTOS SCANDAL: AUSTRIAN QUARRIES EXPLOITED AN EU LOOPHOLE

Brussels banned trade in products containing asbestos decades ago — but, as it turns out, crushed stone isn’t a “product,” it’s a “substance,” and four Burgenland quarries spent years happily shipping asbestos-laden rock across the border to surface streets, driveways, and playgrounds in western Hungary. Austrian authorities shut the quarries in December, the operators insist everything is fine (“people breathe air, not stones,” they helpfully clarified), and the European Commission did not respond to Átlátszó’s inquiry. Orsolya Fülöp digs into the regulatory gap that turned western Hungary into a dust cloud. Read the story 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 NEW INTELLIGENCE CHIEF WANTS TO “DEFEND DEMOCRACY”

After 16 years of Viktor Orbán’s government marred in surveillance and intelligence scandals — spying on EU institutions, hacking journalists’ phones with Pegasus spyware, surveilling opposition figures — Péter Magyar’s new government is moving to rebuild trust in Hungary’s intelligence community, both at home and among allies. Péter Buda, a widely respected national security professional whom independent Hungarian media and VSquare have quoted extensively in recent years, has been asked to take up the role of strategic oversight of all Hungarian national security agencies — a position in some respects resembling that of the US Director of National Intelligence.

“The main goal is to defend democracy,” Buda told me. He listed three priorities: depoliticizing the services, professional renewal of the intelligence community, and adjusting to a changed international political-security environment. A former lieutenant colonel of Hungarian counterintelligence, Buda left the service years ago and went on to become one of the sharpest public critics of the Orbán government’s anti-European, pro-Russian foreign policy, its construction of an international far-right pro-Russian influence network, and its weaponization of Hungary’s intelligence agencies for domestic surveillance of critics. Buda studied applied intelligence in the United States, Middle Eastern and Islamic studies in Israel, religious studies and international relations and world order in the United Kingdom, and the history of international relations in Switzerland (Geneva Graduate Institute), pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees in the latter two fields. He is also a popular Substack author (both in Hungarian and English), and much of his recent writing has focused on Russian hybrid warfare — a topic he has been closely associated with throughout his professional career and research.

His new role is a state secretary-level professional position. Buda will work alongside and report to Péter Tóth, PM Magyar’s powerful former campaign manager, who is now national security advisor to the PM. Buda emphasized that his job is strictly professional, strategic, and analytical — his team at the Prime Minister’s Office will not be involved in operational intelligence. When asked what the new structure resembles, he said it is about making the best use of the lessons offered by models from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Nordic countries, and the Baltic states. Ending the long-running rivalry between Hungary’s different intelligence services and recalibrating their work according to ‘restored transatlantic priorities’ are also among his stated aims.

THE V4’S QUIET CZECH-HUNGARIAN RESET IS LED BY WOMEN

Hungary’s annual Visegrád Group presidency wraps up in June with a prime ministerial meeting in Budapest on June 23 — and with the group’s internal dynamics having been fundamentally shifted by the fall of Viktor Orbán’s regime. The V4 — essentially an illiberal alliance of populists at the height of its relevance in the late 2010s — now has complicated internal chemistry. PM Péter Magyar’s first official trip was to Warsaw and turned into a lovefest. Hungarian-Slovak relations, by contrast, soured over the Beneš decrees and Magyar’s comments on Trianon. But the Magyar government’s relationship with the Czech Republic and Andrej Babiš has gone almost entirely under the radar — and it’s the most interesting one. Babiš is still a formal ally of Orbán; ANO and Fidesz are founding members of the populist right-wing Patriots for Europe group. But behind closed doors, a pragmatic cooperation between Babiš’s and Magyar’s inner circles was being built well before the April 12 election. A Hungarian source familiar with the Babiš government’s thinking told me that, despite the alliance with Orbán, they expected him to lose — in line with independent polls at the time — although they were still surprised by the landslide.

Multiple Czech and Hungarian insiders told me the behind-the-scenes networking with Hungary’s expected winning camp was operationalized by the two most influential women in their respective countries: Tünde Bartha, Babiš’s closest confidant and head of the Czech government office — an ethnic Hungarian from Slovakia — and Anita Orbán, Magyar’s foreign minister and former deputy chair of the GLOBSEC Board of Directors. The two had multiple in-person meetings, neither of which was made public, some of which were well before the Hungarian election and again during the recent GLOBSEC Forum in Prague. “I am very pleased that Anita Orbán and I have been able to establish a working relationship quickly and effectively. Thanks to our many shared professional connections, we were able to begin substantive cooperation almost immediately,” Bartha told me, adding that V4 cooperation has always been extremely important to her and that she’s been working with foreign minister Orbán on the upcoming Budapest summit: “I am glad that Anita Orbán and I can work together in such harmony, pragmatically and intensively. I am convinced that this close cooperation can bring tangible results for both sides.”

CZECH DEFENSE GROUP OMNIPOL PLANS TO BUY AERO VODOCHODY FROM ORBÁN-LINKED SHAREHOLDERS

The collapse of the Orbán regime is having regionwide economic consequences. Regime-loyalist businessmen are expected to lose much of their financial resources as the Magyar government will likely cancel loans and bank guarantees previously issued by state-owned banks. This may explain why Czech defense group Omnipol is planning a bid for AERO Vodochody, the storied Czech aircraft manufacturer. According to an executive summary document on the planned transaction obtained by VSquare, Omnipol — already a minority shareholder — considers the company’s financial situation “close to critical”, and is willing to absorb the full exposure of Hungary’s state-owned MFB Bank, currently around €130 million, in cooperation with a consortium of Czech banks. AERO Vodochody, founded in 1919 and best known for its L-39 Albatros and L-39NG (Skyfox) trainer jets, was owned for 15 years by Czech-Slovak private equity group Penta Investments before being sold in 2021 to HSC Aerojet Zrt., a Hungarian holding company then controlled by businessman Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, who would be appointed Orbán’s defense minister months later in May 2022. The acquisition was originally financed by a roughly €150 million state-guaranteed loan from Hungary’s MFB Bank.

The ownership chain that followed is layered, and reads as a who’s-who of the Orbán-era elite. AERO Vodochody is today 100% owned by HSC Aerojet, of which the Hungarian state holds 15% (through defense holding N7 Holding), while the majority owner is the privately held Magyar Aerojet Befektetési Vagyonkezelő Zrt. Magyar Aerojet’s four owners, all holding their stakes through intermediary vehicles, are senior executives of Hungarian oil company MOL,  Zsolt Hernádi and György Bacsa; Slovak-Hungarian billionaire and former Slovnaft head Oszkár Világi; and Árpád Habony, longtime informal advisor to Viktor Orbán. Omnipol, controlled by the family of Czech businessman Richard Háva, holds a separate minority stake in the structure. Under the bid now being prepared, Omnipol plans to retain the 15% stake for the Hungarian state while fully buying out the Orbán-linked Hungarian owners. The executive summary also warns of a “realistic risk” of a hostile takeover of the MFB receivable and of HSC Aerojet by Hungarian defense conglomerate 4iG Space & Defence Technologies — a group very close to Orbán — and the Czechoslovak Group.

HSC Aerojet, in its reply to my request for comment, denied any financial issues and pointed to its recently published annual report. “The figures show that 2025 was the highest-revenue and most profitable year in AERO’s history,” the company wrote. But the real trouble is expected to hit later, once the Magyar government moves to dismantle the Orbán-era economic empire by unwinding the state-guaranteed loans behind it. (MFB Bank’s president-CEO was replaced by the Magyar government on June 11.) A Hungarian government-linked source told me that the Hungarian state holds an option to acquire a majority of the company, but, given the dire state of the budget left behind by the Orbán government, the Magyar cabinet is unlikely to want to trigger it. Moreover, a senior executive in the Hungarian defense sector added that the flagship L-39NG will struggle against the battlefield realities exposed by the war in Ukraine, and will require significant further R&D investment in the short term to remain viable. Meanwhile, multiple sources also told me that Petr Kolář, the veteran Czech diplomat and former presidential advisor, is personally involved in advancing Omnipol’s bid, approaching potential stakeholders and intermediaries in both Hungary and the Czech Republic. We asked Kolář to clarify his role, but he did not respond by the time of publication. Omnipol and Hungary’s Ministry of Defense also did not respond to detailed lists of questions sent ahead of publication. HSC Aerojet wrote that they are not aware of “any ongoing share transfer, nor of any intention to sell on the part of the other shareholders”.

BREWING IN THE BOTTOM

VSquare’s Tamara Kaňuchová explains how Slovak domestic politics is dominated by financial scandals of leading politicians’ family members.

Slovak politics turn to family affairs. First it was opposition leader Michal Šimečka’s mother; this week, prime minister Robert Fico’s son. On Tuesday, Aktuality reported that Smer Agency — a company registered by Fico’s Smer party — has been paying €5,000 a month to Fico’s son Michal, the firm’s sole managing director. Last year he received €60,000 this way. Meanwhile, since 2024, Fico has been attacking Šimečka for channeling public money to family members. The original target was Šimečka’s partner, who had used grants to finance her dance performances. More recently, the focus has shifted to his mother, Marta Šimečková and her cultural NGO, Project Fórum. Among the suspicious inconsistencies in its accounting were fake and double-issued invoices and bank statements, especially around grants and EU funding, but also the purchase of luxury shelves at an inflated price — around €2,000 more than was declared to the authorities. The NGO “completely neglected their accounting duties” but are ready to take responsibility, Šimečkova’s lawyer responded to the scandal.

“If, for God’s sake, someone in the position of Prime Minister read the name of my mother, my partner, my uncle with specific financial amounts at a press conference, I would run and hide in a bag so that no one would see me for at least two years,” Fico said in 2024, adding that he would resign if such a case were brought against him. Then came the scandal of the Smer Agency. “The issue with the Smer Agency is by no means limited to the diversion of public funds into the pocket of the prime minister’s son. The organization, which Fico Jr. has headed since January 2024, is also part of the problem of undermining the transparency of election campaigns. Smer uses the agency to conceal campaign expenses by funneling hundreds of thousands of euros through a transparent account into a party-affiliated limited liability company, which then runs the campaign outside public scrutiny. Now there is a risk that this model of “opacity” will also influence the upcoming local elections,” Michal Piško, the director of Transparency International Slovakia told VSquare. Fico denies that the company is working with public money, claims they have no issues with annual audits and says it makes its money by owning properties and renting them. 

The two scandals differ in how closely they hinge on family ties. “Relatives of public officials having access to public funds is not automatically a problem; that would also be discriminatory. What matters is whether there is any potential conflict of interest in the decision-making process regarding the allocation of public resources, or whether any preferential treatment could have occurred. If even the slightest suspicion exists, it is important to address it thoroughly and proactively before a decision is made, and to explain this process transparently,” Piško said. Šimečková’s NGO receives grants without — so far — any suspicion of political interference by her son. Smer Agency’s appointment of Michal Fico as managing director, by contrast, looks hard to explain without the family connection.

MORE FROM OUR PARTNERS

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

RUSSIAN LOGISTICS, MADE IN POLAND. A fatal Stockholm truck crash led Frontstory.pl, Buro Media, SVT, and Paper Trail Media to a network of Polish front companies quietly hauling for Russian-Belarusian millionaire Wasilij Smetanin — sanctions-evasion at industrial scale, routed through an Austrian holding and a Kazakh “loan.” (Text in Polish.)

CZECH FANS WON’T BE ABLE TO AVOID THE NARCO-CARTEL AT THE WORLD CUP. The Czech football team’s first match is in Guadalajara — a city ruled for over a decade by the CJNG drug cartel, with mass graves quite literally along the road to the stadium. Investigace’s Pavla Holcová’s article explores whether the pax narco will hold for the tournament. (Text in Czech.) 

€10 MILLION FOR NUCLEAR-WASTE RESEARCH GOES TO A FACULTY WHERE HLAS-SD’S CAMPAIGN DONOR IS DEAN. Slovakia’s Hlas-led education ministry handed nearly €10 million to a Košice mining faculty whose vice-dean both advises the ministry and donated €20,000 to Hlas-SD for Pellegrini’s presidential campaign — with chunks of the cash earmarked for a biomedical firm and a tiny IT startup, neither with any track record in geology. (Text in Slovak.)

“WE WERE DECEIVING OURSELVES”: INSIDE THE COLLAPSE OF FIDESZ’S CAMPAIGN. Viktor Orbán and his team believed that they could hold on to power until the very last moment. After the election, they offered no explanation for the defeat even to their own people — triggering a heated, deeply personal row inside the party. (Text in English and Hungarian.)

MEDIA BLACKLISTS, FAKE NEWS, AND ANGRY BIRDS: HOW THE ORBÁN GOVERNMENT OBSTRUCTED PRESS INQUIRIES. Under Orbán, government institutions avoided answering independent media unless forced by freedom of information request lawsuits — and one Ministry of Agriculture insider told Átlátszó they were instructed to “not answer even the most basic questions asked by hostile media.” (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.

“AUTHORITARIANISM DOESN’T END ON ELECTION NIGHT”: SZABOLCS PANYI ON HOW HUNGARY’S NEW GOVERNMENT MUST DELIVER MEDIA FREEDOM REFORMS. In an interview with Reporters Without Borders, yours truly explains what’s already changed for independent journalists in Hungary, and what the Magyar government still has to actually do. Anything less than structural reform leaves the next government one election away from reversing course.

RUSSIA WAGING “FULL-SCALE COGNITIVE WAR AGAINST US”, WARNS POLAND’S FOREIGN MINISTER. Notes from Poland reports on Radosław Sikorski’s warning that Moscow has spent over $6 billion on its propaganda apparatus since the full-scale invasion — including a record $1.4 billion in 2025 alone — while bluntly noting that “we also have a Russian fifth column here in Poland.”

MOST HUNGARIANS BELIEVE TRUMP HAS HARMED THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EUROPE AND THE U.S. Telex reports on a new ECFR survey across 15 European countries that found that only 11% now see the United States as an ally — though Hungary remains an outlier in one telling respect, with 42% still happy to see Russian oil and gas flowing back into the EU.

THE KREMLIN’S ARMENIA OPERATION: FROM ELECTORAL INTERFERENCE TO MANAGED INSTABILITY. EK Strategic Communications Center maps how Moscow, having failed to stop prime minister Nikol Pashinyan from winning Armenia’s June 7 vote, pivoted overnight to delegitimizing the result — while quietly banking the real prize: openly pro-Kremlin parties now controlling over 30 percent of parliament, ready to serve as a long-term destabilization tool.

This was VSquare’s 67th 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