BUDAPEST, May 12. /TASS/. Ukraine has launched a major smear campaign against Hungary because of Budapest’s continued cooperation with Russia and its refusal to supply the Kiev regime with weapons, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto said, commenting to journalists on the spy scandal between the two countries.
"We are encountering slanderous propaganda amid a large-scale anti-Hungarian campaign, financed and directed by Ukraine. This is happening because of the strong position we have taken on continued war in Ukraine. We are not sending weapons or money there and do not want to abandon our energy partnership with Russia. We also do not support Ukraine’s fast-tracked accession to the European Union," the top Hungarian diplomat said at a press conference in Budapest following a meeting with his Rwandan counterpart Olivier Nduhungirehe.
According to Szijjarto, the latest step in this campaign was the May 9 detention by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) of two individuals accused of working for Hungarian military intelligence. The SBU claimed that they were gathering information on the situation in Transcarpathia, home to a sizable Hungarian diaspora. Szijjarto sees these actions as an attack on all ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine.
Last Friday, following the detention of these two individuals, the sides mutually expelled each other’s diplomats. Hungary demanded that two employees of the Ukrainian Embassy in Budapest allegedly involved in espionage under diplomatic cover leave the country, while Ukraine expelled two Hungarian diplomats from Kiev.