Statement on Smear Campaign Against VSquare Journalist

Anna Gielewska (VSquare)
Wojciech Cieśla (FRONTSTORY)
Photo: Shutterstock 2026-03-25

More from the Region

The Orbán government is once again resorting to authoritarian tactics to target a journalist whose reporting exposes truths inconvenient to the regime.

Our colleague Szabolcs Panyi, a journalist for VSquare (a Central European investigative outlet run by the Polish Fundacja Reporterów), has come under a brutal, coordinated attack by the Hungarian government. Following his latest investigation into Russian influence in Budapest, the government launched a smear campaign against him. The objective is clear: to undermine his findings, distract the public, and discredit a reporter who reveals compromising information about the regime. This is unfolding in the final days of an election campaign where, for the first time in over a decade, Orbán’s grip on power is under serious threat.

This is the Kremlin’s modus operandi: a playbook straight out of Soviet manuals written at Lubyanka. The Hungarian regime harbors a deep-seated hostility toward investigative journalists and has systematically fought them for years. This is not the first time Szabolcs in particular has been in the crosshairs. In 2021, it was revealed that he was among the first Hungarian victims of the government’s use of the notorious Pegasus spyware. Today, the very same government that wiretapped him is accusing him of “handing over a Hungarian minister’s phone number to foreign intelligence services,” a claim as absurd as the notion that any “foreign service” would struggle to obtain a politician’s contact details. What actually happened: Szabolcs was investigating the methods and channels through which Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has been leaking sensitive information from EU meetings to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The Orbán regime cares for neither logic nor facts. It is desperately grasping for stunts that might bolster its position in the campaign’s final stretch — much like the recent, pretextual detention of a Ukrainian convoy by Hungarian authorities. Szabolcs was also the one who exposed the bizarre reality behind that operation, and it is precisely for his essential journalistic work that he is being targeted today.

The government-controlled Sovereignty Protection Office has also long targeted VSquare with blatant lies, often as part of broader harassment against our Hungarian partners. Allegations of serving “foreign” (Polish, European, Western, American, etc.) interests have become another song on the government’s broken record. Their sole purpose is to divert attention from the increasingly visible axis between Budapest and Moscow.

We will not be intimidated. We will continue to do investigative journalism, serving the public interest, our readers, and the very democracy that Orbán so clearly despises.

Anna Gielewska, Editor-in-Chief, VSquare

Wojciech Cieśla, Head of the Reporters Foundation, Editor-in-Chief of FRONTSTORY

Anna Gielewska

Anna Gielewska is co-founder and editor-in-chief of VSquare and co-founder of Polish investigative outlet FRONTSTORY.PL. She is also vice-chairwoman of Fundacja Reporterów (Reporters Foundation). A journalist specializing in investigating organized disinformation and propaganda, Gielewska was the John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University (2019/20) and has been shortlisted for the Grand Press Award (2015, 2021, 2022) and the Daphne Caruana Galizia Award (2021, 2023). She was the recipient of the Novinarska Cena in 2022.

Wojciech Cieśla

Co-founder and editor-in-chief at FRONTSTORY.PL, Wojciech Cieśla is an award-winning Polish journalist who, since 2016, has worked with Investigate Europe. He is the co-founder and chairman of Fundacja Reporterów (Reporters Foundation). He is based in Warsaw.