An international investigation published on March 31 by FRONTSTORY, VSquare, Delfi Estonia, The Insider, and ICJK has raised extremely serious allegations against Hungarian diplomacy. According to the authors, the material — including transcripts and recordings of conversations — suggests that Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó maintained a direct channel of communication with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and used it not only for political consultations, but also to help weaken EU sanctions against Russia.

The most striking thread of the investigation concerns a conversation from August 30, 2024. According to the disclosed material, Lavrov contacted Szijjártó regarding Gulbahor Ismailova, the sister of Russian-Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov, who was under EU sanctions. The Hungarian minister was said to have assured him that Hungary, together with Slovakia, would submit a request to have her removed from the sanctions list and would “do everything” possible to make it happen during the next review of the restrictions. This is especially significant because in March 2025 the European Union did in fact renew the sanctions while removing several names from the list, including Ismailova, after pressure from Budapest.

The investigation also describes another, even more politically explosive issue. In a separate conversation with Russian Deputy Energy Minister Pavel Sorokin, Szijjártó was allegedly heard saying that he was doing everything he could to block or water down another EU sanctions package, including restrictions targeting Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” and selected Russian banks. According to the published records, the minister even claimed that he had already “removed 72 entities from the list,” although the investigation itself notes that it is unclear exactly which 72 and 128 entities he was referring to. What is known, however, is that in June 2025 Hungary and Slovakia officially blocked the 18th EU sanctions package, and the EU adopted it only on July 18, 2025. It covered, among other things, additional ships from Russia’s shadow fleet, while the company 2Rivers, mentioned in the context of the conversations, later entered liquidation.

These revelations do not appear in a vacuum. Earlier, The Washington Post reported that Szijjártó had for years been passing information from EU meetings to Lavrov, even during breaks in the sessions. The European Commission described those reports as “very troubling” and demanded explanations from Budapest. Szijjártó initially dismissed the claims as “fake news,” but later acknowledged that he regularly speaks with partners outside the EU — including Russians — portraying it as normal diplomatic practice.

The political weight of the case is enormous, because it concerns not only Hungary’s relations with Russia, but also trust within the EU and NATO themselves. Reuters had already reported that Donald Tusk spoke of long-standing suspicions that information from closed meetings had been leaking to Moscow, while Lithuanian politicians mentioned restricting Hungarian participation in more sensitive formats. At the same time, Viktor Orbán’s government responded with a counteroffensive: authorities launched proceedings related to the alleged wiretapping of the minister, and a few days later went further by accusing investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi of espionage.

In practice, the latest investigation reinforces the image of Hungary as a country that formally remains part of Western institutions, yet politically operates increasingly close to the boundary of loyalty to them. If even part of the disclosed conversations proves authentic and complete, it would mean not only an attempt to protect specific Russian economic interests, but also a deeper problem: the presence of Russian influence at the very heart of EU decision-making. For Brussels, this would not simply be another dispute with Budapest, but a warning that the issue no longer concerns only Orbán’s political sympathies and has begun to affect the institutional security of the European Union as a whole.