As Hungary enters the final month of its election campaign, tensions with Ukraine have risen daily. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz has made anti-Ukraine messaging central to its campaign, alleging Kyiv could interfere in the vote or even attack Hungary. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Orbán of backing Russia “by every means at his disposal, short of attacking with missiles or drones.”
Russian oil deliveries to Hungary via Ukraine have been interrupted since a late-January attack on the Druzhba pipeline. Budapest accuses Kyiv of deliberately blocking the flows to influence Hungary’s election; Hungary has in turn blocked EU aid to Ukraine. The dispute has escalated further over a March 5 incident in which Hungarian special forces stopped two security vans belonging to Ukraine’s Oschadbank that were transporting cash and gold from Vienna to Ukraine via Hungary, temporarily detaining seven Ukrainian citizens.
Oschadbank and its Austrian partner insist the transport was a lawful, routine cash transfer. The detained Ukrainians were released and expelled, and the vans were returned, but the cargo — roughly $80 million (€70 million) in euro and dollar banknotes and about 9 kilograms of gold — remains in Hungarian custody. A government decree on March 9 ordered the assets held for at least 60 days pending investigation into their “origin, destination, use and purpose,” and the Hungarian parliament passed a law to the same effect the following day.
Legal experts have raised doubts about Hungary’s money-laundering allegations and the legality of the seizure. Miklós Ligeti, head of legal affairs for Transparency International in Budapest, said that a genuine laundering operation would involve suspicious transfers or transaction chains intended to hide the funds’ origin — which does not appear to be the case here. Ligeti and others suspect the government may be trying to retroactively legalize actions that lack a proper legal basis, calling the transport a national-security threat to justify seizures after the fact. Julia Poczé, a legal researcher at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, warned that creating a legal basis retroactively to seize a shipment violates fundamental legal principles.
The European Commission said it is “looking at the situation closely.” Observers note the seizure seems linked to the pipeline dispute. Hungary’s Transport Minister, János Lázár, publicly acknowledged that Hungary’s steps were not independent of the pipeline closure, a comment that critics say undermines the legal rationale for the asset seizure. Transparency International’s Ligeti described Hungary’s approach as a political tit-for-tat driven by the pipeline conflict rather than by a clear criminal case.
With Fidesz trailing in polls ahead of the April parliamentary election, the government has amplified claims that Ukraine threatens Hungary’s energy security and safety. Budapest has dispatched what it calls a fact-finding mission to inspect the Druzhba pipeline; Ukraine says no official visits were scheduled and has reportedly treated the Hungarian delegation as tourists. The European Commission said it was not involved in planning the mission but is working on establishing a fact-finding group that would include all affected parties.
As rhetoric intensifies, the status of the Druzhba pipeline, the seized Ukrainian assets, and the future of the EU’s planned defense loan to Ukraine remain uncertain.
Edited by: Aingeal Flanagan
