Russian-backed smear campaign launched against Orbán critic Methodist pastor

"Disinformation campaigns targeting the Hungarian opposition could be a prelude to more serious Russian activity, former national security officer and intelligence expert Péter Buda told Telex at the end of January. He said this after a bizarre piece of fake news started spreading online, citing a bogus organization called the European Center for Investigative Journalism (ECIJ), which claimed that Magyar Péter had smuggled $16.7 million in cash out of Ukraine to London at the request of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Gnida Project, an organization researching Russian hybrid warfare linked this disinformation operation to a group called Storm-1516. The code name comes from Microsoft's cyber warfare department, which has been tracking the group's activities for years. According to a Washington Post investigation and sanctions documents from the US Department of the Treasury, Storm-1516 has close ties to Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU.

As the latest article by the Gnida Project points out, the Russian campaign has indeed continued. Another piece of fake news appeared in early February, again with the same Russian group behind it, attempting to implicate Péter Magyar in Ukrainian corruption cases and accusing him of embezzling €40 million in EU aid.

And now, here is the latest disinformation operation from Storm-1516, targeting the Hungarian public. This time, the target is Methodist pastor Gábor Iványi, a fierce critic of Orbán, alleged to be accused of sexual abuse by 15 of his former students. The story first appeared a few days ago on a website called oknyomozoriport.hu, which claims that Iványi's victims were children aged 8 to 13, several of whom have since attempted suicide.The article then transitions to Péter Magyar, describing him as a close ally of Iványi, whom he considers his “spiritual leader.”

The article cites no sources for the story, its wording is awkward and foreign-sounding, with some phrases clearly pointing to a poor-quality translation. For example, it begins Iványi's introduction with the sentence, "Gábor Iványi was born in Hungary in 1951 and became one of the country's best-known Methodist pastors and social activists." If a Hungarian had written this text for a Hungarian audience, it is highly unlikely that they would have considered it important to mention that Iványi was born in Hungary.

Oknyomozoriport.hu is not a real news site, and it does not make any particular effort to hide this. Apart from the article on Iványi, the site only includes content pieced together using AI-generated text and stock photos, judging by the dates of the articles, dating back to 2024. However, the dates are false: the domain itself was only registered by a private individual on February 18 of this year. The campaign targeting Iványi started two days later, on the 20th, with the article first shared on X by a page called Tóthné Mária, which primarily disseminates Fidesz propaganda. A video has also appeared on this page, listing the claims made in the article, although it was not originally included in the original article.

This post only garnered a few hundred views and a few dozen likes and comments. Then, the next day, on February 21, seemingly independently of each other, 17 Nigerian English-language channels with tens of thousands of followers posted the article and video within just a few hours. At the same time, the story appeared on the Oknyomozó Riport Facebook page and they started running two ads for it. These reached 35,000 and 90,000 people in 24 hours, mostly in the over-55 age group.

By the way, the Oknyomozó Riport Facebook page was originally registered last summer under the name "Nvghsdv" as the page of a car repair shop. It has 4,800 followers, most of whom are clearly fake accounts. The page was renamed on February 20, coinciding with the launch of the disinformation campaign, and it was then that it was filled with content. The sponsored posts have a few thousand reactions and a few hundred shares at this point – these already come from real Hungarian users.