Goulash: Kremlin’s Vote-Meddling Team in Budapest; Slovakia’s Shady Help for Arms Group IPO

FRESH FROM VSQUARE

DID SLOVAKIA’S DEFENSE MINISTRY BANKROLL CZECHOSLOVAK GROUP’S STOCK MARKET DEBUT?

The Investigative Centre of Ján Kuciak (ICJK) maps out how Slovak Defense Minister Robert Kaliňák’s ministry signed contracts worth over 60 billion euros with companies belonging to arms tycoon Michal Strnad Jr.’s Czechoslovak Group — much of it in the months just before CSG’s landmark IPO on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in January 2026. The deals, which include a staggering 58-billion-euro framework contract for artillery ammunition with CSG’s Slovak subsidiary ZVS holding, as well as helicopter and military truck purchases, helped cement CSG’s skyrocketing valuation ahead of the listing — which raised €3.8 billion and turned the 33-year-old Strnad into one of the richest people on the planet. ICJK raises the question of whether Kaliňák’s ministry — which has a long, tangled relationship with both Strnad Jr. and his father, Jaroslav — deliberately timed or structured the contracts to boost CSG’s IPO prospects. Kaliňák denies any conflict of interest. Read the investigation here.

THE DISINFORMATION MACHINE BEHIND CZECH AND SLOVAK ANTI-WIND FARM CAMPAIGNS

Matěj Moravanský (Deník Referendum) and Karin Kőváry Sólymos (ICJK) trace how organized opposition to wind power in Slovakia is being exported into Czechia. At the center is Daniel Máčovský, a self-styled “Himalayan yogi” who runs a 6,000-member Slovak Facebook group spreading debunked claims about turbine health risks — while his colleague Katarína Ondrušová tours Czech villages facing wind farm proposals alongside far-right politicians. Both deny Russian ties but operate within a network of disinformation outlets, one previously linked to a GRU espionage case. Read this joint investigation here.

THOUSANDS OF UKRAINIAN REFUGEES LIVE DAY TO DAY IN HUNGARY

Hanna Solti at Átlátszó reports from a Budapest workers’ hostel on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion, where a 10-member Transcarpathian family survives in three tiny rooms with no state support. In August 2024, a government decree stripped roughly 4,000 such refugees of housing assistance, ruling that Transcarpathia was not a “direct combat zone” — despite the families being almost entirely ethnic Hungarians. Around 80 percent of appeals were rejected without justification; evictions went ahead even after both the Metropolitan Court and the Supreme Court ruled the decisions unlawful. A sobering read about the community Orbán most loudly claims to protect. Read the full 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. 

PUTIN’S ELECTION MEDDLERS ARE COMING TO HUNGARY

Multiple European national security sources have told me that the Kremlin has tasked a team of political technologists with meddling in Hungary’s April 2026 elections. The goal, according to my sources, is straightforward: keep Viktor Orbán in power. The man tasked by the Kremlin to deal with Hungary is Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s First Deputy Chief of Staff and the architect of Russia’s entire political influence infrastructure, domestic and foreign. A former head of Rosatom who became Putin’s domestic policy czar in 2016, Kiriyenko has dramatically expanded his remit over the past two years, treating foreign elections as extensions of Russia’s political management toolkit. Moldova was his most recent and most aggressive testing ground, where his operation deployed vote-buying networks, troll farms, and on-the-ground operatives to swing elections against pro-European President Maia Sandu. It didn’t fully work — but the blueprint is intact, and, according to my sources, the Russians are now trying to apply it to Hungary. Based on conversations with national security sources from three different European countries, the intel on the Kremlin’s attempt to support Viktor Orbán’s campaign has been shared with partners, and many EU and NATO agencies are likely already aware — and watching.

There is a new face at the top of Kiriyenko’s foreign influence structure since the Moldova operations. In late 2025, Putin created a brand-new Presidential Directorate for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation, dissolving two older departments previously overseen by the since-resigned Dmitry Kozak. Kiriyenko installed Vadim Titov to head it — a loyalist he knows from their shared years at Rosatom, where Titov ran the state corporation’s international network. Titov is not a diplomat in any traditional sense; like Kiriyenko, he is a political organizer and operator. His new directorate’s focus is on the post-Soviet space — which, in Kremlin thinking, now includes Hungary. The Hungarian operation is being structured on the ground, too. The plan is to embed Russian experts on social media manipulation within the Russian Embassy in Budapest, equipped with diplomatic or service passports. Immunity from prosecution is the whole point — a lesson directly learned from Moldova, where authorities had to spend years dismantling Russian embassy operations before eventually cutting Russia’s diplomatic staff more than threefold. My sources say the Budapest arrangement involves a three-man team working out of the embassy on behalf of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service — though it remains unclear whether they are already active.

This is not the first time Russian operatives with opaque functions have made themselves comfortable inside Budapest’s diplomatic infrastructure. Regular readers will recall my earlier reporting on how Hungary has been welcoming Russian military diplomats with GRU ties — who cultivate “friends” within Orbán’s propaganda apparatus. Meanwhile, pro-Orbán media is amplifying anti-Ukrainian Kremlin narratives more loudly than ever — useful cover for an operation that works best when the information ecosystem is already amenable. And according to one Central European source, Kiriyenko’s Hungary task force is in active contact with campaign operatives linked to the Orbán government. What that cooperation looks like in practice is something I’m continuing to report.

ORBÁN’S RULING PARTY IS LOSING — AND POINTING FINGERS INSIDE

Poll numbers coming out of Budapest are alarming for the ruling Fidesz party, and sources close to the government know it. Last week, Medián — one of Hungary’s most credible independent pollsters — published a survey showing Tisza leading Fidesz by 55 to 35 percent among decided voters certain to cast a ballot: a twenty-point gap. On Polymarket, the blockchain-based prediction market where people put real money on outcomes, Péter Magyar is beating Viktor Orbán 64 to 36. Hungary’s government, predictably, moved to ban access to Polymarket, citing “illegal gambling.” Whether the issue is really gambling or unflattering odds is left as an exercise for the reader. Behind closed doors, sources close to the government tell me the mood inside Fidesz is increasingly tense — and that fingers are being pointed firmly at one man: Balázs Orbán, Viktor Orbán’s political director (no relation to the PM) and the campaign’s chief architect. He is not a campaign professional. He is a political theorist and ideologue who built his reputation running Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), the Orbán government’s $1.7 billion publicly funded ideological training ground, and cultivating ties with the American right. He replaced András Gyürk, who had run Fidesz campaigns since 2004. What Gyürk had in institutional knowledge and experience, Balázs Orbán does not.

According to my sources, the core complaint is that Balázs Orbán is trying to copy-paste the Trump playbook onto a Hungarian electorate that isn’t buying it. The campaign has been pulling in what one source described, using language attributed to Balázs Orbán himself, as “Hulk Hogan characters” — D-list celebrities and influencers sometimes with criminal background deployed to shore up the base, to diminishing effect. Meanwhile, the campaign talks almost exclusively about foreign policy: the war, Brussels, Ukraine, Iran, Trump. It gives enormous importance to Viktor Orbán’s Washington visits and his relationship with the American president — as if proximity to Trump translates into votes in Debrecen or Miskolc. Péter Magyar, by contrast, is grinding through Hungary’s towns and villages, talking about crumbling health care, low wages, and corruption. He is running a bread-and-butter campaign. Fidesz is running a geopolitical seminar. The internal consensus forming is brutal: if Fidesz somehow wins in April, it will be in spite of Balázs Orbán’s campaign, not because of it. If it loses, he will surely be among those taking much of the blame.

The panic is visible even in Fidesz’s institutional orbit. On February 25, the very same day the Medián poll landed, MCC director Zoltán Szalai sent a letter to the institution’s students, parents, and staff warning that the opposition Tisza’s party’s election program explicitly targets MCC for dismantlement and asset reclamation. The letter, obtained by 444.hu and HVG, was not subtle: it framed the election as an existential threat to more than 8,000 students currently enrolled for free. For an institution that was handed $1.7 billion in public assets by a Fidesz parliamentary majority — and whose board is chaired by the same Balázs Orbán now running the campaign — the timing said everything. Goulash readers who have been following MCC’s expanding political footprint — including its behind-closed-doors presentation to the Heritage Foundation in Washington, on which I reported earlier this year — will not be surprised that the institution is now openly mobilizing as a campaign asset. What is new is how openly afraid they look.

MORE FROM OUR PARTNERS

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

THE NUMBER OF ATTACKS ON JOURNALISTS INCREASED AGAIN IN 2025. ICJK’s journalist safety platform recorded 77 incidents against journalists last year, up from 74 in 2024, including three death threats. The platform warns this is a fraction of the real picture. (Text in Slovak.)

GREEK CASE OF SPYING ON JOURNALISTS AND THE OPPOSITION: INTELLEXA EXECUTIVES AND ASSOCIATES SENTENCED TO 8 YEARS. An Athens court found four figures behind the Intellexa spyware firm — including its founder Tal Dilian and his partner Sara Hamo — guilty of illegally wiretapping over 90 politicians, journalists, and businesspeople using the Predator spyware in a scandal that broke in 2022. The total sentence handed down was 126 years; the defendants are expected to serve 8. (Text in Czech.)

HOW WE MAKE DIREKT36’S OPERATIONS EVEN MORE SECURE. Direkt36 editor and founder András Pethő announces that ownership of the Hungarian investigative outlet is being transferred to a newly established German non-profit company, Direkt36 Ug. The explicit reason: protection against the Orbán government’s escalating pressure on independent media. (Text in Hungarian and English.)

FOR YEARS, THE GOVERNMENT HAS FIERCELY DEFENDED THE GÖD SAMSUNG SDI FACTORY. Átlátszó went back through nearly 60 parliamentary questions submitted by opposition MPs since 2022 about the factory’s toxic pollution and labor violations — and found that ministers responded with copy-pasted boilerplate dismissals, all while the factory received 133 billion HUF in fresh state subsidies in 2023. (Text 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.

ON TUCKER. Emily Tamkin’s newsletter has a sharp take on Tucker Carlson’s contentious interview with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — a window into the growing fractures within the American right over Israel, the West Bank, and AIPAC’s influence.

HOW ORBÁN SYSTEMATICALLY SUFFOCATED THE HUNGARIAN MEDIA OVER THE PAST 15 YEARS. Amrit Singh and Bea Bodrogi write for EUobserver on the findings of a new NYU Rule of Law Lab report with Hungarian watchdog Mérték Media Monitor: a forensic account of how Fidesz methodically captured around 80 percent of Hungary’s entire media market between 2010 and 2025.

THE MOTHER OF RUSSIA’S FIRST DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER IS FINANCING THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY. iStories reveals that companies connected to Denis Manturov and his family received shares in defense factories as late as 2010 — despite Manturov’s claims that he walked away from private assets before entering government. More damningly: between 2022 and 2025, a cluster of defense enterprises paid his 89-year-old mother billions of rubles in loan repayments and interest.

16 MILLION TELEVISIONS: HOW PÉTER MAGYAR’S DIGITAL REVOLUTION DETHRONED VIKTOR ORBÁN’S PROPAGANDA MONOLITH. Polish think tank Res Futura has an impressive analysis of how Magyar — in a country of under 10 million — generated nearly 16 million video views by “hacking” the Hungarian public opinion algorithm, turning a blanket ban on paid political advertising into a strategic advantage against Orbán’s media empire.

CARDBOARD COFFINS AND COUNTERTOP MONUMENTS: RUSSIA IS INCREASINGLY CUTTING COSTS ON THE BURIAL OF ITS WAR DEAD. The Insider’s Nikita Aronov reports that the funeral industry is one of the few growth sectors in Russia since the war began — with at least 916,000 deaths recorded in the first half of 2025 alone, disproportionately among the young, and increasingly attributed to causes unrelated to illness.

This was VSquare’s 61st 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