When they were stopped in central Budapest this week, the two vans were carrying more than $80 million in cash and 9 kilograms of gold bars, along with seven Ukrainian citizens, who were en route from Austria to their home country.
Hungarian police raised the alarm, detained the vehicles, arrested their occupants, and even released a theatrical arrest video accompanied by an action-film soundtrack.
Ukraine was apoplectic. And the words started flying.
“We demand immediate answers from Kyiv regarding large cash shipments passing through Hungary that raise serious questions about a possible link to the Ukrainian war mafia,” Foreign Ministry Peter Szijjarto said in a social media post.
“We are talking about Hungary taking hostages and stealing money,” Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Andriy Sybiha said.
“This is state terrorism and racketeering,” said Sybiha.
The seven Ukrainians "are employees of state-owned Oschadbank, who were operating two bank cars transiting between Austria and Ukraine and carrying cash as part of regular services between state banks," he wrote on X.
SEE ALSO: Hungary, Slovakia Block New EU Sanctions On RussiaOn its own, the incident would be remarkable.
But it’s happening at a time when Hungary’s pugnacious prime minister, Viktor Orban, is in the fight of his political career, with polls showing him far behind his political rivals in next month’s national elections. An Orban loss would be a tectonic shock for Europe.
Orban and his ruling Fidesz party appear to have settled on one central theme for their campaigning: vilify Ukraine.
High political drama in Eastern Europe. Here’s what you need to know.
Zakarpattya, Budapest and Points In Between
Relations between Budapest and Kyiv have always been prickly at best.
Some of the bad blood dates back decades: competing claims over swaths of territory that used to be called either Galicia or Transcarpathia, depending on the era.
When European maps were redrawn in the rubble of World War II, Ukraine -- then part of the Soviet Union -- ended up with a chunk of territory where a sizable chunk of ethnic Hungarians live.
Today around 150,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine's western Zakarpattya region, bordering Hungary.
Over the past decade -- since the 2015 migration crisis in particular -- Orban has frequently embraced nationalist tropes about what it means to be Hungarian.
He’s also frequently complained that ethnic Hungarians living other countries -- Ukraine, Slovakia, Romania -- suffer discrimination or worse; and he has embraced those communities as a key voting constituency.
It’s caused friction inside Ukraine, where security services have suggested that the Orban funding of ethnic Hungarian communities has a sinister purpose.
SEE ALSO: Hungary's Veto Casts Shadow Over EU Enlargement TalksOver the four years of all-out war since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Orban has routinely voiced sympathies for Russia’s position and President Vladimir Putin – and cast aspersions at Ukraine’s. He’s also butted heads with the European Union, which has sent billions of euros in loans and grants to Ukraine, and imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia.
On the eve of the invasion anniversary, Orban infuriated EU members – and Kyiv -- when he blocked the newest package of sanctions on Russia, and a 90 billion-euro loan to keep Ukraine’s battered economy from sinking.
Orban “managed to create a climate of hostility towards the victim of aggression, and…now is trying to exploit that in the general election,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in the wake of the vote.
The Druzhba Pipeline
Prior to February 2022, Russia was a major supplier of oil to Europe. It was a major source of revenue for Moscow and European Union banned the import of Russian oil via pipelines to try to squeeze off that revenue stream.
But Hungary and Slovakia secured exemptions to those sanctions for oil transported via the Druzhba pipeline, which crosses Ukraine, much to Kyiv’s chagrin.
On January 27, a section of the pipeline was damaged. Kyiv blamed a Russian drone.
Both Budapest and Bratislava accuse Ukraine of dragging its feet with repairs, while Ukraine said it needs more time to complete the work. Negotiations to send a European inspection team have also faltered.
“Honestly speaking, I would prefer not restore it," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters on March 5.
“But since the EU loan for Ukraine for 90 billion euros will be blocked without the restoration of the oil pipeline, the restoration…is possible in a month and a half."
For Orban, cheap Russian energy has powered the Hungarian economy, and brought prosperity to -- and support from -- voters. But the economy has stagnated in recent years, stoking grumbling.
That’s given the opposition, led by Peter Magyar, an opening. Recent opinion polls show Magyar’s political bloc, Tisza, leading Orban by nearly 10 percentage points.
Orban and Fidesz have embraced more traditional retail electioneering: like trumpeting subsidized energy bills for pensioners, or tax breaks for other constituencies.
They’ve also brandished Zelenskyy – along prominent EU officials – as villains aiming to undermine Hungary’s sovereignty – as well as drag Hungarians into the war in Ukraine.
SEE ALSO: Generation Apathy: How Peter Magyar Is Mobilizing Hungary's YouthOne AI-generated video by Fidesz that circulated this week invoked World War II-imagery. “For now, this is only a nightmare, but Brussels is preparing to make it a reality,” the caption reads.
What About The Vans With The Money?
In the video released by Hungary’s tax authorities, Hungarian officers are shown wielding rifles as they handcuff a group of men wearing jackets with Ukrainian lettering on them and force them lying down to the ground. The video pans to the van’s interiors stacked high with wrapped packages.
Like Szijjarto, Hungarian officials portrayed the string as a blow against Ukrainian war mongering. One of the Ukrainians was identified as a former military intelligence officer.
All seven individuals will be expelled, said Zoltan Kovacs, a government spokesperson.
In Kyiv, Oschadbank -- the state savings bank and one of Ukraine's largest financial institutions -- issued a statement saying the vehicles were on authorized assignment to transport money and gold from the Austrian bank Raiffeisen.
“The transportation of funds and valuables was carried out…in accordance with an international agreement with Raiffeisen Bank. The cargo was registered in accordance with international transportation rules and current European customs procedures,” the bank said.
“Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the transportation of foreign currency and bank metals has been carried out exclusively by land. Such [transports] are carried out by Oschadbank’s collection vehicles every week,” it added.
Ukrainian officials reacted angrily; the Foreign Ministry called on Ukrainians not to travel to the country.
“Hungary taking seven Ukrainians hostage in a method reminiscent of 1990s era Moscow would be a bit surprising if it hadn't come just a few days after the Orban entourage's visit to the Kremlin,” Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said in a post to social media.
That was a dig at Szijjarto who traveled to Moscow this week, and met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The visit included the announcement by Putin that he was freeing two Ukrainian-Hungarian men who had captured and held as prisoners-of-war by Russia.
Putin claimed the two men had been “forcibly conscripted” by Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said they complained directly to the European Union about Hungary’s detention of the money-transport vans.
The Foreign Ministry said on March 6 it had summoned the Acting Chargé d'Affaires of the Hungarian Embassy in Ukraine "to provide explanations regarding the circumstances and legal grounds for the detention of employees of the state-owned Oschadbank," who were "transporting funds and valuables as part of regular transportation between state-owned banks."
In Brussels, EU officials avoided reporters’ questions on the incident. One EU official told RFE/RL: “We are dealing with it behind closed doors, yes.”
“At the moment there is a lot of escalating rhetoric and inflammatory rhetoric. We believe that such rhetoric from all sides is neither helpful nor conducive to achieving the common goals we all have here,” EU spokesman Olof Gill told RFE/RL.