The Hungarian government offered support – mostly in the form of intelligence information – to Iran in the days following the September 2024 Hezbollah pager detonations, according to a Washington Post report.
In an event that rocked Lebanon, over 3,600 people were wounded throughout the country on September 17, 2024 – a large majority of them Hezbollah members – when the pagers that they used to communicate exploded. Additional Hezbollah operatives in Syria and Iraq fell victim to the attack as well.
Just two weeks later, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi: “Our secret service has already contacted your services, and we will share all the information we have gathered during the investigation.”
This information was conveyed by telephone, according to a copy of a Hungarian government transcript of the September 30 call obtained and authenticated by a Western intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.
“Every possible document will be shared with your services,” Szijjarto reportedly said.
This appears to contradict the Hungarian government’s official policy of support for Israel, the report noted, adding that Hungary’s president, Viktor Orban, has aligned himself with both the pro-Trump MAGA movement and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Hungary’s foreign minister offered to send his Russian counterpart a document about Ukraine’s European Union accession, leaked recordings purported to show on Wednesday, in the latest indication of Budapest’s warm relations with Moscow.
“I will send it to you. It’s not a problem,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto says in one conversation, after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Moscow is trying to get a document about the role of minority languages in Ukraine’s EU accession talks.
The audio clips released by a consortium of investigative news outlets, including VSquare.org, were the latest in a series of leaked conversations that purport to show how the government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has worked to serve Russian interests and undermine EU efforts to aid Ukraine.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the audio, but Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has previously said wiretapping of his phone calls was a “huge scandal,” and Orban has ordered an investigation into it.
Reuters and Yonah Jeremy Bob contributed to this report.
