The EU Has to Re-Evaluate Its Enemies from Within
By Iulia Beldean
A Washington Post article from 21 March 2026 mentioned a staged assassination attempt on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, after a not very successful effort to leak a CCTV intimate tape in mid-March concerning the now chosen prime minister of Hungary, Péter Magyar. It also revealed that the Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó would frequently leak confidential information from EU closed-door meetings to the Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Serghei Lavrov.
This confirms a suspicion most EU leaders had regarding Orban and his Eurasian affinities, but it’s something other Eastern European countries like Lithuania have warned about since 2019, as they have previously sought to exclude Hungary from NATO meetings. But whose warnings never fully came through at a higher EU level or led to any action taken from the EU’s most influential leaders at the Council.
After this article, more and more details have been revealed regarding the nature of these communications, including a leaked phone call dialogue between them, in which the Hungarian Minister is informing Lavrov of attempting to lobby in favour of the removal of Gulbahor Ismailova, a Russian oligarch’s sister, from the list of sanctions. This would happen usually during breaks between meetings.
Parts of the leaked phone call are as follows: Lavrov- ‘I am calling at the request of Alisher, and he just asked me to remind you that you were doing something about his sister’, Szijjártó- ‘together with the Slovaks, we are submitting a proposal to the European Union to delist her.’ The 90-second recording made anonymously was followed by another recorded call between Orban and Putin, in which Orban told the dictator ‘I am at your service’.
This was the final nail in the coffin for Orban’s 16-year rule, underestimating, once again, his voters' critical thinking and relying on fear-mongering (by building a campaign based on AI-generated Fidesz ads showing Hungarian fathers dying on the frontlines in Ukraine if the opposition party is chosen) and humiliation when all the other cards have been thrown. The timeline was cruel; after the reveal of the blatant Hungarian-Russian cooperation, nothing could save the already ending illiberal regime.
While one Russian pawn has been eliminated, others remain in the Council and still pose a security risk both for the EU and NATO. Suspects are harder to point out, and there is no common EU law framework for identifying or signalling out acts of treason against the European Union, as the matter ultimately falls on the shoulders of individual member states, which might be counter-productive, since those states would rarely engage in hurting their own diplomatic representatives. This legal loop makes it harder to fight against groups or officials who represent the interests of hostile states like Russia, or far-right American think tanks inside the EU.
The most recent example of this kind of think tank is the Heritage Foundation. They are forging alliances with NGOs such as the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture in Poland and Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary. In their joint report released in February 2025 called ‘The Great Reset. An Urgent Need for Drastic Reform’, the priorities set for the European continent are to reduce the powers of the Commission significantly, bringing more power to member states, and most importantly, limiting the primacy of EU law before national law. The Heritage Foundation’s former vice president, James J. Carafano, highlights in his invitation to the European NGOs to present their points before the Foundation the reshaping of trans-Atlantic relations and the purpose of fighting for the continent’s freedom.
It would make sense why countries from the Visegrad group would have a degree of Euroscepticism or self-preservation, as the alliance has moved gradually towards the right in recent years. Now, the new veto-user in the European Council is suspected to be the most likely future prime minister of Bulgaria, Rumen Radev, even if his influence is considered to be significantly lower. Other possible disruptors could be Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, Slovenia’s Janez Janša and Slovakia’s Robert Fico. On the other hand, Georgia Meloni proved to be surprisingly cooperative.
After the fall of the USSR, the EU’s opinion on an end to hostilities on the continent was taken at face value, by building closer economic ties with Russia, most notably starting with Gerhard Schröder and the construction of Nord Stream pipelines, a policy continued by Angela Merkel, only for him to later become a Gazprom lobbyist. The pipeline, which was built in 2015, was only stopped indefinitely on 22nd February 2022. North Stream 1 exploded under mysterious circumstances.
