PM Orbán: Pro-war, pro-Ukrainian propaganda network operating in Hungary UPDATED

Hungarians’ heating bills would quadruple and electricity bills double if the Ukrainians’ plan to prevent European Union member states from buying Russian energy pans out, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in a weekly interview with public radio on Friday.

Utility prices

Orbán said it would cost Hungary an additional 800 billion forints (EUR 2.0bn) a year if the country had to replace its energy from Russia with other sources. He added that amount was equivalent to the annual government support for the regulated utilities price scheme for households.

Orbán said the majority of EU member states had adopted energy policies that made hurting Russia, and thus helping Ukraine, a priority, rather than supporting their own countries’ families and businesses.

• ‘Energy threat’ from Ukraine intensifying, says PM Orbán

Hungary is opposed to that position and is clashing with the member states that take it, Orbán said. He added that the government would not allow sanctions on Russian energy to be extended to Hungary.

Orbán said the Ukrainians were behind the policies to raise energy prices, adding that it wasn’t unreasonable to speak about “Ukrainian energy threats”.

He said the Ukrainians shared the same goals as the European leaders who believed that they were hurting Russia by helping Ukraine.

Ukraine, the prime minister said, was demanding something from Europeans “which will ruin families”, adding that Hungarian families faced the same threat.

We need Russian gas, Orbán says

The prime minister said the debates in Brussels weren’t happening “over people’s heads”, but rather “in their homes”, and Hungarians’ electricity and heating bills were at stake.

Orbán said efforts to ban Russian gas from Europe “must be stopped”.

He said the pipeline infrastructure through which Hungary gets Russian gas wouldn’t matter if that gas was banned. Such a measure would burden Hungary’s budget to the same degree as the regulated utilities price scheme for households, he added. Nobody, he said, had addressed the matter of the sustainability of the measure amid the circumstances.

“This is what I usually say in Brussels: ‘I understand you want to hurt Russia and help the Ukrainians … but why do Hungarians have to pay the price? Where is the money? Give it here and then we’ll be even’,” he added.

“We can be negotiated with,” the prime minister said, adding that “it’s a different situation if Brussels agrees to pay the costs of the negative effects their policy has on Hungary.”

Hungary will not pay to support Ukraine

So far, Orbán said, Brussels was ignoring the issue and thinking that Hungarians should be the ones to pay the price. “But I’ve always told them that this isn’t our war, and that I won’t allow Brussels to make us pay for supporting Ukraine,” he added.

Orbán noted that the project to build the Nabucco gas pipeline bypassing Ukraine was thwarted at the time, but the Hungarian government, “having recognised the danger”, linked its gas network with Slovakia’s and set up a pipeline running through Serbia, Bulgaria and Turkiye by linking up existing interconnectors.

Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Slovakia, too, has been receiving gas via this network, the prime minister said, adding that though this project may not have been in line with short-term business considerations, it had turned out to be aligned with long-term energy security considerations.

Gas supply

Orbán said Türkiye was a key country in terms of Hungary’s gas supply, noting that the country receives gas from both Azerbaijan and Russia, and “is brave enough to allow the transit of Russian gas no matter what they are told”.

Hungary, he said, has signed an agreement with Azerbaijan under which Hungarian businesses could acquire shares in the country’s gas fields.

This allows Hungary to lower the price of its energy needs, he said, adding that a country like Hungary “which lost the territories where its energy resources were located” had “a lot to do”.

Orbán said Hungary wanted to keep Ukraine out of the European Union because if it was admitted, “it will absorb all of our money like a sponge”, and central Europeans, including Hungarians, would be paying the price.

“For some reason, western European leaders have decided to broker an agreement with Ukraine on maintaining an army of roughly one million troops,” Orbán said. He said this would be financed by Europeans, emphasising that instead of bolstering its own military, western Europe would be paying Ukraine.

He warned that this could pose a “serious security risk” for Europe, arguing that the bloc could end up financing an army “whose intentions won’t always be friendly, or at least there’s no guarantee that they will be”.

EU membership

The issue of Ukraine’s EU membership, he said, was related to this, arguing that it was “much easier to make financial decisions in favour of Ukraine if the country is in the EU than if it isn’t”.

Orbán encouraged the public to participate in the Voks 2025 vote on Ukraine’s EU membership. “Let’s not let others decide over our heads,” he said.

The prime minister said he trusted that the vote, which more than a million people have participated in so far, would strengthen the government’s position opposing Ukraine’s EU membership.

He noted that the opposition Tisza Party has held its own vote on the issue, with 58 percent of its base voting in favour of Ukraine joining the bloc.

Orbán said the Hungarian opposition parties “essentially have Ukrainian connections” and the Ukrainians had an easy job involving themselves in Hungarian politics through the opposition parties.

He said “there is a pro-war, pro-Ukrainian propaganda network operating in Hungary … pushing pro-Ukrainian positions” every day, but “we have taken the necessary moves to counter this” by submitting the transparency bill to parliament.

Espionage scandal

The opposition parties were known to be pro-Ukrainian as they supported Ukraine’s EU membership, Orbán said, but it was not expected that the Ukrainian secret service “maintains such a deep relationship with them”.

As regards the Ukrainian man arrested in Budapest, he said there was “intensive Ukrainian espionage activity” in Hungary. All states have some kind of intelligence system, which must be tolerated in international practice, he said, adding, however, that experience showed that Ukrainian activity had intensified in Hungary and operational actions were also being organised.