And although the state media in Hungary does the Russian propaganda job flawlessly, there are also pro-Russian websites that operate independently of the state media, but have a background in Russian intelligence. An example is the Hungarian edition of NewsFront, a family of newspapers founded in occupied Crimea, published in 11 languages and targeted at 25 countries, about its three Hungarian-linked authors and editors. The international investigative website Vsquare.org published an article on Monday.
The page’s propaganda importance is insignificant: it’s about the NewsFront family of international newspapers, Article made in international co Based on traffic data provided by and between branches, the Hungarian version is the least visited after the Serbian version. It is typical for a VKontakte page from the Hungarian version to have 63 followers, and there are often large gaps between content posts.
However, it is interesting to read the kind of personalities that appear behind the facade of Hungarian news – the term ’emerging’ is no coincidence, since we are talking about personalities about whom a great deal of public information can be found, and none of whom responded to inquiries made by investigative journalists at Vsquare. — and also about the exact levels to which the KGB’s propaganda efforts are reaching.
The sea front
The Hungarian news front began in 2018 with a 40-minute YouTube interview featuring far-left historian Tamas Krausz and retired diplomat Sandor Šizkus, one of the most significant pro-Kremlin online initiatives in Hungary in the mid-2000s, We stand with Russia “Editor-in-Chief” of the Facebook page called (Anah A We wrote in detail on the old index) spoke to Ukrainian separatist “people’s rebels” who are “confronting the genocidal campaign of the pro-Nazi Ukrainian regime”.
NewsFront was launched in written form a few months after the interview on YouTube, with a manifesto calling for a “revolution” against Kiev, the EU and the US, and its author was none other than the interviewee for the aforementioned conversation, Tanai Chukhanov. Based on the professional portrait painted by the fact-finding article, Chulkhanov is a real political adventurer who, after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, served as an imam (religious preacher) for the Tatar minority living on the peninsula since the 17th century. However, the 46-year-old was born in Voronezh, Russia, which is 1,300 km away from Crimea, and belongs to the Volga Tatar minority, which has different historical, ethnic and cultural roots than Crimea. He was a Muslim preacher in St. Petersburg before 2014. After occupying Crimea, he began working on the peninsula against local Tatar chiefs who opposed Russian annexation and rejected a rigged referendum approving it — almost certainly on behalf of the Russians. Secret services.
Tanaj Chulcanov – Source: VSquare
After 2014, Chukhanov appeared in the occupied regions as well in eastern Ukraine, where he also fought in the militias of the separatist “people’s republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk, boasting about his past as a marine. The Vsquare authors state that Russia then created a Hungarian unit dedicated to the political division of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the “St. Stephen’s Corps”, but that no Hungarians may have fought in it. Moreover, the unit itself soon became irrelevant and moved to the electronic front, with Chulakhanov spreading anti-Ukrainian propaganda through his leaflets. Even in the year 2023, the Szent István Légió has been recruiting international volunteers on VK.com and Telegram, promising them a legal contract and a high salary – but there is no indication of actual deployment or even the existence of the Legion.
Who paid Spöttle before Spöttle
Since its founding, one of the main goals of NewsFront has been to stir up the feelings of the approximately 120,000 Hungarian separatists living in Transcarpathia; According to the expert who spoke in the fact-checking article, it is clear that the beginning of the Hungarian news front coincided with the deliberate attack on the Hungarian Cultural Association in Subcarpathia in Ungvar, which turned out to be. It was a provocative act by pro-Russian neo-Nazis.
The material in Hungarian is full of misspellings or inaccuracies in the Hungarian language or Google Translate; Which reveals that at least some of the Hungarian NewsFront material was written by people/bots who do not know the Hungarian language. However, one of the NewsFront’s authors/editors is Hungarian Sándor Žiczkus, who worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and has never hidden his anti-NATO and (apparently nostalgic for Kádar) far-left views, though this has been Considered a trusted KKM diplomat (in the article according to one of his former colleagues, Siskos, who was deputy ambassador to Moldova and then chargé d’affaires for a few months until his retirement in 2013, he was “a complete idiot, but a reliable operator and a decent person”).
Shishkos has already pushed Shabwa in front of George Spotl: in 2018, he exposed “the lies of George Soros, the Nazi regime in Kiev and the Western media” from Donbass.
Hungary is an expert on Russian public media
Also linked to the NewsFront is Miklós Kivihazy, the Hungarian “expert” who, completely unknown in Hungary, appeared on a program on Russian state channel Rosszija 1 TV in 2018, and who claimed – without any basis whatsoever – that Viktor Orban’s advisors were encouraging him to ” Just try it” to occupy Transcarpathia, suggesting to the average Russian news consumer that the Hungarian government is contemplating some kind of military intervention against Ukraine.
Between 2013 and 2017, Kivhazy was Jobbik’s Russian translator and expert on Russian affairs, after which he entered Russian public media, where he was an expert on other topics besides Hungarian affairs, such as the Pegasus case or the crisis of the Bulgarian government. Later, he became one of the editors of the emerging newspaper NewsFront. Although he never appeared on the platform under his own name, fact-checking journalists managed to extract his name from the site’s source code, and the source code reveals that he is the author of several Hungarian NewsFront articles.
