During Easter, Serbian officials discovered two backpacks containing bombs and detonators near a key gas pipeline that carries Russian gas through the Balkans to Hungary. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said, “Our units found an explosive of devastating power.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó immediately suggested Ukrainians were to blame. Szijjártó said in an Instagram video the incident fit a pattern of attacks on Hungary’s energy supply and implied Ukraine organized sabotage. DW Fact Check labels that framing misleading.
Serbian investigators have denied any link to Ukraine. Duro Jovanić, director of Serbia’s Military Security Agency (VBA), said, “It is not true that Ukrainians tried to organize this sabotage.” Vučić said the explosives were placed a few hundred metres from the TurkStream pipeline, which supplies more than half of Hungary’s gas. Serbian authorities opened an investigation; no public, verifiable evidence has identified the perpetrators. Officials noted the explosive materials were originally manufactured in the United States, but that origin does not determine who carried out the placement.
Ukraine also rejected responsibility. Heorhii Tykhyi, a Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesperson, wrote on X that Ukraine had nothing to do with the incident and called it “most probably” a Russian false-flag operation intended to interfere in Hungary’s election. Donatienne Ruy, a Europe and Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, described the incident as a sign of “desperation.”
The timing — explosives found six days before Hungary’s 12 April election — was notable. Opinion polls showed Orbán’s Fidesz trailing the opposition. After the discovery, Orbán went to the Hungarian side of the border with soldiers and publicly linked the event to wider claims that Ukraine was targeting Hungary’s energy supplies, saying Ukraine’s ambitions posed a “mortal threat” to Hungary.
Claims of a staged operation gained traction because Hungarian analysts and security services had warned that an attack on energy infrastructure could be falsely attributed to Ukraine ahead of the vote. Security analyst András Rácz had posted on social media a fictional scenario describing a Russian false-flag involving Ukrainian explosives and specifying TurkStream in Serbia days before the actual explosives were found.
The wider context is a tense Hungary–Ukraine relationship over energy. Hungary depends heavily on Russian oil and gas — far more than most EU states — and has accused Ukraine of disrupting flows on pipelines such as Druzhba. Hungary has cited Ukraine-based strikes on Russian compressor stations feeding TurkStream as evidence of a campaign against its energy supply, but the Kyiv Independent and other outlets were unable to verify some of those claims. Keeping cheap Russian oil flowing has been central to Orbán’s campaign, and he has frequently blamed Ukraine for threats to Hungary’s energy security and resisted tougher EU measures on Russia.
In short: while Hungarian officials’ statements implied Ukrainian responsibility, Serbian investigators and Ukraine deny involvement and no verifiable evidence has been published to identify the perpetrators. DW Fact Check rates the insinuation that Ukraine organized the pipeline sabotage as misleading.
Edited by: Astrid Prange