Ukraine is interested in influencing Hungarian national elections in April, said Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó in a new video posted to his Facebook page.
He points to work done by Ukrainians in creating an app for the rival Tisza Party, which is the main opposition facing Orbán during April national elections.
“It is clear what Ukraine’s interest is in the Hungarian parliamentary election, and it is clear who and through what they want to act in line with this interest,” said Szijjártó.
He added that “if anyone had any doubts about whether the Ukrainians would interfere in next year’s Hungarian parliamentary election, they could be sure that the Ukrainians are strongly interested in influencing the outcome of the Hungarian parliamentary election.”
The foreign minister is referencing a data leak that showed that individuals connected to Ukraine were behind the creation of an app for the Tisza party. The leak affected approximately 18,000 users of the party’s mobile app. Among the data leaked was that of one of its admins, a Ukrainian developer, Myroslav Tokar, who works for app development company PettersonApps.
This has aroused concerns that Péter Magyar, the leader of Tisza, used a Ukrainian company to develop the app, thus presumably transferring the data of Hungarian citizens to Ukraine.
The CEO of PettersonApps is Oleh Ostroverkh, a supporter of Zelensky and a member of the supervisory board of the NGO Defense Robotics UA, writes Mandiner. This NGO has close ties with the Ukrainian army’s “Da Vinci Wolves” battalion, particularly in the development, deployment, and tactical testing of ground-based drones.
Orbán’s government has pounced on the data leak, pointing to foreign influence in the hotly contested election.
“This is not surprising, as the Ukrainians and everyone else know that if a national government remains in office, then the Hungarian government’s decisions will exclusively follow the Hungarian national interest, and then Ukraine will not become a member of the European Union,” said Hungary’s foreign minister.
It is clear that there are numerous foreign interests involved in the upcoming Hungarian national elections, with Ukraine in particular likely to pull out all the stops to remove Orbán from power. Szijjártó himself makes it clear that his party will reject Ukraine’s EU and NATO membership bid if his party remains in power.
“We will not allow Brussels to unleash the Ukrainian mafia, the shoddy Ukrainian agricultural products and the war itself on the European Union. If a Brussels puppet government is established in Hungary, then obviously all obstacles to Ukraine’s accession to the European Union will be removed.
It is clear what Ukraine’s interests are in the Hungarian parliamentary elections, and it is clear how they are pursuing these interests,” he concluded.
