The Washington Post has run a bizarre story about how an unnamed “European intelligence service” had discovered a plan by the Russian secret service to stage a fake assassination attempt of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
A former high-ranking official in Poland said to Brussels Signal: “I have no doubt that this European country [from which the report came] is Poland, and that the memo itself either does not exist or is currently being fabricated.
“I very much doubt that the Polish services have the capability for this sort of operation abroad. Technically, only the Americans, the French and the Germans have it. But social and political circles indicate that this is about Poland.”
“[Security services] can contain the most sensational reports, which turn out to be completely untrue. They should never be treated as the sole source,” he said.
The Post story says that the SVR, the Russian secret service, planned the stunt in response to the “plummeting public support” for Orban in the Hungarian election on April 12.
The story said Orbán’s alleged “friendly ties to Moscow” have given the Kremlin “a strategic foothold inside NATO and the European Union” and they had to create a “Gamechanger” to ensure Orbán’s re-election.
However, the idea of “plummeting” support for Orbán does not make sense, with one leading opinion poll last week showing support for Orban and his Fidesz party rising to 46 per cent with the opposition Tisza at 40 per cent.
Off the record discussions with well-placed Hungarian sources say the difference is likely to be two to three per cent.
Which raised the question whether the “European intelligence service” report is true, and if it is not, who planted it.
Suspicions arise particularly about the story because it is in The Washington Post, a newspaper in financial trouble which lost over $100 million in 2025 and a similar figure in 2024.
Last month management sacked 30 per cent of its staff following earlier layoffs and suffered a loss of 60,000 subscribers in recent months.
With its staff numbers reducing story output, observers wonder if this is a story for which there were not enough reporters to check sources.
Just one reporter’s name is on the story, Catherine Belton, and she does not mention any other source for the alleged report. She merely says the Post “reviewed” the report.
This could give further indication that the unnamed “European intelligence service” which fed Belton the story was a Polish source.
Belton once worked at the Post alongside American Polish journalist Anne Applebaum, who is now living in Poland and married to Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski.
Applebaum recently was in the news after writing that US President Donald Trump spoke like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.
As early as 2010, Applebaum saw a threat to democracy in Hungary; in 2018, she portrayed Hungary as a one-party state; in 2021, she called Orbán an autocrat; in 2025, she wrote that he had left the country “corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished”; and in 2026 she called him de facto Russia’s spokesperson within the EU.
Sikorski first gained international note in 2014 when a secretly recorded conversation in a Warsaw restaurant showed him using language too obscene to repeat here and disparaging the US-Poland security relationship as “worthless”.
Applebaum praised Belton’s book on Russia, Putin’s People, calling it the definitive study on Russia.
The Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk equally attacks Trump. In 2022, he announced to all Poles that “Trump’s dependence on the Russian intelligence services is beyond dispute today. This is not merely my assumption.”
He added: “The American services do not rule out the possibility that Trump was actually recruited by the Russian services as long as 30 years ago.”
Tusk produced no evidence for this claim.
