US Vice President JD Vance has arrived in Hungary, where he was met by Foreign Minister Szijjártó, Radio Liberty reports.
Vance is expected to convey the support of the Trump administration to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ahead of the parliamentary elections on 12 April. During the visit he will meet with Orbán and may attend a rally alongside him, Reuters reports.
Orbán presents himself as a Trump ally. He has also been at odds with the EU in recent times, and has in particular been blocking aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia.
Before departure, the US Vice-President JD Vance told reporters before departure that he was "looking forward to seeing my good friend Viktor," adding: "We'll talk about any number of things related to the US-Hungary relationship. Obviously, I'm sure Europe and Ukraine and all the other stuff will figure in pretty prominently."
In Budapest, the two are to hold a joint press conference before appearing together at a pre-election rally at the MTK Sportpark, framed officially as a celebration of Hungarian-American friendship day, according to Reuters and RFE/RL senior Washington correspondent Alex Raufoglu.
The visit follows a 25 March video message in which US President Donald Trump declared "complete and total support" for Orbán and called on Hungarians to vote for him. Trump later made his personal stake explicit: "I hope he wins, and I hope he wins big." Trump also signalled that Hungary's exemption from US sanctions on Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil — secured by Orbán during a Washington visit last October — was a personal deal between the two leaders, meaning a new Hungarian government would have to renegotiate it from scratch.
Most polls place the opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar — a former Fidesz insider who broke with the party in 2024 — between 10 and 20 points ahead of Fidesz. Only the strongly pro-government Nézőpont agency shows Fidesz narrowly ahead. Magyar's statement on Vance's arrival was unambiguous: "No foreign country may interfere in Hungarian elections. This is our country. Hungarian history is not written in Washington, Moscow, or Brussels — it is written in Hungary's streets and squares."
From leaked calls to fake gold bars: Russia's open hand in Hungary's campaign
While American support for Orbán has been conspicuous, Russia's has been structural, analysts say. Peter Kreko, director of the Budapest research group Political Capital, told the New York Times: "The story is less secret Russian interference than open Russian cooperation with our authorities on anti-Ukrainian messaging, energy cooperation and hostility to the European Union. This is pretty much unprecedented in a European election."
The scope of that cooperation came into focus last week when a consortium of European media outlets released a 2024 recording of a call between Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. On the recording, Szijjártó tells Lavrov he was working — at Moscow's request — to remove Gulbahor Ismailova, sister of Kremlin-linked billionaire Alisher Usmanov, from the EU sanctions list. "We will do our best in order to get her off," Szijjártó can be heard saying. Before hanging up, he added: "I am always at your disposal." Ismailova was removed from the EU list last March. Szijjártó has not disputed the recording's authenticity, describing it instead as evidence of foreign interference in Hungary's election, without naming the intercepting service. Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin said the recording confirmed "what many suspected — that the Hungarian government has been doing the bidding for Russia within the European Union for quite some time."
On the campaign trail, Orbán has placed sinister-looking images of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on billboards across the country, paired in some cases with Magyar's photo and the slogan: "They are dangerous! Let's Stop Them. Only Fidesz on 12 April." At a rally near Budapest, Orbán told supporters the opposition was "supported by Zelensky, supported by Brussels" and would "destroy Hungary." The script closely mirrors one issued in August by Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, which claimed Ukraine and the EU were conspiring to topple Orbán, adding that the "Zelensky regime is doing the dirty work."
The Fidesz campaign's relationship with verifiable fact has also come under scrutiny. After Hungarian authorities seized two Ukrainian bank vehicles in March, pro-government media accused them of carrying funds for Tisza and published photographs purporting to show Hungarian police examining piles of gold bars and cash. The police badges on the officers' sleeves, however, were written in Cyrillic — a script not used in Hungary — exposing the images as almost certainly AI-generated fakes.
Magyar, campaigning in the western town of Keszthely, avoided the Ukraine issue directly, instead invoking the 70th anniversary of Hungary's 1956 uprising crushed by Soviet troops. The election will decide whether "we can finally live in a truly sovereign, truly free, truly independent and European country," he said, and its result would depend "not on Tehran, not on Brussels, not on Ukraine, but only on you."
Pipeline explosives: Kyiv calls it a Russian false flag, Magyar says he had advance warning
The final week of campaigning was further inflamed by an incident on the TurkStream pipeline. On 5 April, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić announced that explosives had been found and neutralised on the section of the pipeline connecting Serbia to Hungary. Orbán immediately convened an emergency security council and deployed troops to protect critical infrastructure, with pro-government media framing the episode as a Ukrainian attack on Hungary's energy supply.
Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the accusation outright. Spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi wrote on X: "We categorically deny attempts to groundlessly link Ukraine to the incident involving explosives found near the TurkStream pipeline in Serbia. Ukraine has no involvement in this whatsoever." Tykhyi went further, suggesting the incident was "most likely a Russian false-flag operation as part of Moscow's interference in Hungarian elections."
Magyar echoed that assessment and added a striking detail: he claimed prior information had circulated that something would "accidentally" happen on the pipeline in Serbia at Easter — precisely one week before the Hungarian vote. He accused Orbán and the Serbian authorities of staging "another false-flag operation." Former Hungarian intelligence officers also expressed scepticism about the official account.
The episode fits a pattern analysts have tracked throughout the campaign. Peter Buda, a former senior Hungarian intelligence officer, told the New York Times that the "obvious collaboration" between Orbán's government and Russia had left the election "unusually vulnerable to Russian narratives," adding that Russian disinformation "unfortunately serves the interests of the current governing party."
