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“It is impossible to watch without a word on how reality is distorted in the state media in connection with the Russian aggression, while the Hungarian opposition positions are taken out of context, completely changing their original meaning. This practice is reprehensible and particularly irresponsible, given that the European Union is already penalising Russian media companies that spread Putin’s war propaganda,” the letter said.
The European Commission said it is moving to ban both the Kremlin-backed media outlets RT and Sputnik from broadcasting, with countries around the bloc reporting access to both blocked on Tuesday.
“With many people still losing their lives defending their homes in Ukraine, which is neighbouring Hungary, it is extremely important to provide accurate information and fair presentation of political discussions. In the current war situation, the minimum is that the state media that is maintained for more than 130 billion forints should meet these requirements,” it concluded.
On Saturday, the prime ministerial candidate for the joint opposition in the upcoming April 3 election, Peter Marki-Zay, also demanded that “broadcasting of Russian propaganda in the Hungarian public media be halted with immediate effect.”
Failing to keep up with the times
György Nógrádi, a self-styled security policy expert, giving a lecture on Thursday, March 23, 2017 at the Larus Event Center, Budapest. Photo: Elekes Andor
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of Moscow’s closest allies in the EU, has lined up behind all the sanctions imposed. In a televised interview on Sunday evening, he said that although he is “not a believer in the benefit of the sanctions”, this was “not the time to be clever, but to be united”.
Orban also underlined that – in contrast to Poland or Slovakia – Hungary would not send weapons to Ukraine because the country “cannot spare any”. On Monday, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto repeated that Hungary would not send any troops or weapons to Ukraine and wouldn’t even allow any lethal weapons bound for Ukrainian forces to transit its territory.
Reacting to the Hungarian government’s decision, the chairman of the EPP Group in the European Parliament, Manfred Weber, told Euronews that “Viktor Orban must decide on which side he stands” and called forbidding Western weapon transports an “unbelievable double game”.
But in the first days of the invasion, Hungary’s government-loyal media struggled to follow Orban’s change in policy. The war took most of their so-called experts by surprise. Hungary’s public, taxpayer-funded television, long a mouthpiece of the Fidesz government, reported about the initial invasion last week by calling Luhansk and Donbas, the two Ukrainian regions occupied by Moscow and its proxy forces, “territories between Russia and Ukraine”.
For days, the main headline on the state-owned public broadcasting channels was “Ukrainian-Russian conflict”, avoiding the words “war” or “invasion”, let alone “aggression”. Experts spent the first hours describing how smooth the military incursion of Russian forces had been and reiterated the dangers of the “far-right” Volodymyr Zelensky administration.
When the Ukrainian president announced that weapons would be distributed among civilians to protect the country, Georg Spottle, a security expert, compared him to Hitler, who also armed women and children in the last weeks of World War II. Another expert regularly quoted by state-run television, Gyorgy Nogradi, claimed it was Ukraine that had started the war.
“I sensed a huge level of confusion among the government media,” Agnes Urban from Mertek Media Monitor told BIRN. “They deliberately avoided using the word ‘war’, and most of the reports were about the consequences and how Hungary is helping the refugees. But little was explained about the root causes, let alone the responsibility of Putin or Russia.”
Two days after Russia launched its invasion, the government-loyal daily Magyar Nemzet ran an opinion piece that claimed a neutral Ukraine would be beneficial for Hungary, in that a puppet government installed by Russia in Kyiv would give more rights to the Hungarian ethnic minority than the current far-right government which it claimed “terrorises members of the Hungarian ethnic community”.
Protecting the 150,000 ethnic Hungarians mostly living in the Transcarpathian region (Zakarpattia Oblast) on the border between the two neighbours is a key concern for the Hungarian government after the minority was deprived of their language rights under a 2019 law that came into effect last year.
Another widely disseminated narrative by the pro-government media has been that the US and the West are ultimately responsible for the current situation, as they pushed too hard with NATO expansion and failed to understand the security concerns of Russia.
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