Russian bot network spreads fake news about assassination attempt against Orbán

A Russian disinformation network is spreading fake videos about an assassination attempt and coup attempt against Viktor Orbán, investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi writes, citing the Russian opposition investigative website Agents Media. According to the portal, the Russian disinformation group Matryoshka has mainly been spreading these fake news on X, and similarly to their previous operations, they have been using the official logos of real news outlets.

The network’s operations were exposed by the Russian Bot Blocker project, which previously reported that the group is exploiting the Hungarian-Ukrainian conflict to generate media noise. Some of these fake news stories, for example, claimed that the Ukrainian president had described Hungarians as being backward, or that a Ukrainian refugee, Denis Nikolaychuk, had been arrested in France for allegedly attempting to throw a homemade grenade onto the grounds of the Hungarian embassy in Paris.

The bot army has now turned up the volume and on 17 March posted a video implying a possible assassination attempt against Orbán. They tried to pass off the video as if it were footage from Deutsche Welle. The post claims that “a group of Ukrainian refugees suffered fatal injuries in Hungary while attempting to detonate a homemade explosive device near Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s office.” Thanks to artificially inflated viewer numbers generated by bots, the post featuring the video garnered approximately 100,000 views.

Several of these posts claim that Ukrainians are trying to stir up tension in Hungary.

• One of them, for example, says that Hungarians are receiving messages from Ukrainians "calling on them to take up arms, encouraging them to resist the authorities, and urging them to assassinate Orbán."
• Another claims that Oleh Tatarov, the deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office, urged Hungarians to take up arms and “achieve Hungary’s liberation through a bloody revolution.”
• A third post published on March 20 falsely claimed that Yevhen Khmara, the acting head of the SBU, had published Orbán’s personal information on X – including his home addresses – with the call to “Take action!”
• Another post attempted to implicate the SBU in “developing a plan for a violent takeover of Hungary.”
• There was also a video which claimed, using the name of The Kyiv Independent, that the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture had officially recognized the work of a graffiti artist who incited violence and a coup against Viktor Orbán.

Panyi writes that according to a representative of the Bot Blocker project, they had never before encountered any instances where the Kremlin-operated network had threatened a military coup in the event that a Kremlin-friendly candidate won the election, so this is a new development.

The disinformation campaign was revealed shortly after The Washington Post, citing Western intelligence officials and an internal report it had obtained, reported, among other things, that Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has regularly consulted with Sergey Lavrov during breaks in his EU meetings. This would mean that the Russian Foreign Ministry was essentially immediately informed of what was discussed there. When it comes to Matryoshka, however, it is even more interesting that the paper also reported that the idea of a staged assassination attempt against Viktor Orbán had been raised within a unit of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).