Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Sunday said a media report alleging Hungary’s foreign minister regularly called his Russian counterpart to brief him during EU summits “shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.” “We’ve had our suspicions about that for a long time,” Tusk posted on social media network X. “That’s one reason why I take the floor only when strictly necessary and say just as much as necessary.” The Washington Post in a story published Saturday quoted an anonymous European security official as saying that Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó made regular phone calls during breaks at EU summits to provide his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with “live reports on what’s been discussed” and possible solutions. POLITICO has not independently verified the story. Szijjártó denied the claims in a post on X on Sunday, calling it “fake news.” Szijjártó was responding to a X post by Poland’s Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Radosław Sikorski that referenced the Washington Post claim. “This would explain a lot, Peter. @FM_Szijjarto,” Sikorski wrote. “Fake news as always,” Szijjártó responded to Sikorski. “You are telling lies in order to support Tisza Party to have a pro-war puppet government in Hungary. You will not have it!” The Post’s story also said that Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR) had proposed staging an assassination attempt against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to boost plummeting public support ahead of next month’s parliamentary election in that country. It cited an “an internal report for the SVR obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.” Orbán goes head to head in the polls next month with conservative opposition leader Péter Magyar, for the Tisza Party, who has emerged as a serious challenger. Szijjártó extended his defense against the allegations in a post on Facebook. Hungarians can “see clearly that this fake news, these lies that are part of Ukrainian propaganda, are not created for anything else, except to support the Tisza Party in the Hungarian election and to influence the outcome of the elections,” Szijjártó said on Facebook. Magyar weighed into the controversy on the campaign trail. “The fact that the Hungarian foreign minister, a good friend of Sergei Lavrov, reports to the Russians almost every minute about every EU meeting is pure treason,” Magyar said in the Hungarian village of Nyúl, as reported by Hungarian outlet Telex. “This man has betrayed not only his country, but Europe.”

The Trump administration is doubling down on its endorsement of Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán in next month’s Hungarian elections, even as Orbán’s deal-blocking in Brussels has been labeled “unacceptable” by EU peers. U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday reiterated his “complete and total endorsement” of Orbán in the Hungarian elections. And U.S. Vice President JD Vance is reportedly due to fly to Budapest in April in support of the prime minister. The EU’s longest-serving leader, facing an election in less than a month that he is forecast to lose, has long been a thorn in the side of Brussels. In the latest stand-off against his European counterparts, Orbán held hostage a €90 billion loan to Ukraine this week over an oil dispute. “The prime minister has been a strong leader whose shown the entire world what’s possible when you defend your borders, your culture, your heritage, your sovereignty and your values,” Trump said in a video address to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) taking place in Hungary on Saturday. Trump praised Hungary’s “strong borders” and said the country will continue to “work very hard on immigration,” and said Europe has to “work very hard” to solve “a lot of problems” around immigration. The American president said that Hungary and the U.S. are “showing the way toward a revitalized West,” and would also work “hard together on energy.” Vance is planning an April trip to Budapest just ahead of the Hungarian elections in a show of support for Orbán, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto confirmed in a podcast on Friday. Reuters first reported on Vance’s planned trip to Budapest.

LONDON — Two men have been charged Wednesday evening with spying on locations and individuals linked to the Jewish community on behalf of Iran. Nematollah Shahsavani, a 40-year-old dual British and Iranian national, and Alireza Farasati, a 22-year-old Iranian national, were charged under the National Security Act with engaging in conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service between July 9 and Aug. 15 last year. The Crown Prosecution Service confirmed the charges related to Iran. The Metropolitan Police’s Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans described the charges as “extremely serious” after counter terror Police investigated alleged surveillance of places and people in London’s Jewish community. “We fully recognise that the public — and in particular the Jewish community — will be concerned,” Evans said. “I hope this investigation reassures them that we will not hesitate to take action if we identify there may be a threat to their safety, and will be relentless in our pursuit of those who may be responsible.” The men were originally arrested and detained on March 6 while two other men arrested on the same day were released without charge. The head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division Frank Ferguson said “the charge relates to carrying out activities in the U.K. such as gathering information and undertaking reconnaissance of targets.” Shahsavani and Farasati will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court Thursday March 19.

Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyar is accusing the Kremlin of supporting the election campaign of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán with a new barrage of disinformation videos that are supposed to appear on Thursday. Orbán is the EU leader closest to Russian President Vladimir Putin — and a persistent obstacle to Brussels’ support for Ukraine — but he now faces the toughest fight of his political career in Hungary’s April 12 election, where polls put him about 10 points behind Magyar.   Magyar — a former member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, who understands its playbook — said on Tuesday he’d received information that the attack would take the form of “14 AI-generated smear videos,” and complained that the disinformation campaign had been produced “with the help of Russian intelligence services.” People in Magyar’s Tisza party and analysts in Budapest have long expected the race to get dirty as it enters the final stretch. Magyar’s tactic is to sound the alarm on the alleged impending smear attacks against Tisza before they land, hoping to blunt their impact. That’s the same strategy he adopted in mid-February, when faced with the prospect that his opponents could release a sex tape featuring him. He went public and accused Fidesz of planning to release a tape “recorded with secret service equipment and possibly faked, in which my then-girlfriend and I are seen having intimate intercourse.”   For now, that intervention seems to have worked, and such a video has not yet been released. BLOWING THE WHISTLE On Thursday, just as Magyar arrives to campaign in a constituency on the Danube close to Budapest, his team expects Fidesz to target the local candidate and her family with AI-generated videos which will be promoted via fake accounts. Magyar announced his concerns on social media, and called on Orbán “to immediately halt the planned election fraud and order Russian agents out of Hungary.” “By advancing what’s going to happen, we hope to neutralize it … whenever we had any information, [Magyar] made it public right away,” Zoltan Tarr, Tisza’s No. 2 and a long-time Magyar confidant, told POLITICO. “The system is not 100 percent waterproof or leakproof. And we always get some hints of what will be Fidesz’s next move,” he added. It’s too early to assess whether this strategy of going public will be successful for the sex tape and future smear campaigns, said Péter Krekó, executive director of Political Capital, an independent policy research consultancy. But he added that anticipating Fidesz’s moves had worked “really well” to build Magyar’s “Teflon image” because no scandals had yet “burnt” him. Tisza has also raised the specter of foreign interference, openly accusing Orbán of inviting Russian spies to meddle in the election, following reports by independent media VSquare and journalist Szabolcs Panyi. Fidesz denies the allegations. “The left-wing allegation linked to journalist Szabolcs Panyi, claiming Russian interference in the elections, is false,” the Hungarian government’s international communications office told POLITICO in a statement. “No information supports the presence or activities in Hungary of the specific individuals named by Szabolcs Panyi, or of any other persons allegedly engaged in such activities. Other countries’ intelligence services also have no concrete information regarding this matter.” Fidesz members insist Magyar is financed by Ukraine with the aim of installing a puppet government that will be loyal to Kyiv and Brussels. They accuse Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of interfering in the election by blocking Russian oil imports via the Druzhba pipeline and threatening the life of Orbán. The latter allegation came after the Ukrainian leader insinuated he would refer Orbán to Ukrainian troops for a direct talk “in their own language.” The leading Fidesz lawmaker in the European Parliament, Tamás Deutsch, turned the tables and accused Tisza of spreading false information. “As part of this serious interference, the pro-Ukrainian and pro-Brussels Tisza party is spreading disinformation through sympathetic media outlets in Brussels and Hungary,” he told POLITICO. “Hungary and its government will not accept pressure or interference in its democratic processes and will do their utmost to stand up for the interests of the Hungarian people.” FORCING RESIGNATIONS Because the deadline to register candidates for the April 12 vote has passed, the names on the party lists can’t be changed. For this reason, analysts say, Fidesz may now try to dig up dirt on Tisza candidates in the 106 constituencies to knock them out of the race with no hope of replacement. “There are some people who have had certain issues in their lives in the past. Nothing criminal, but perhaps they had a company that had to be closed down, or they went through a divorce, or something similar. These things then can be used as hooks to try to infiltrate the psyche of the candidate, creating false narratives around them,” said Tisza’s Tarr. The campaign that Magyar alleges will be launched on Thursday targets a candidate for the fifth district in Pest, Orsolya Miskolczi. He has not given further details, but Kontroll, a media platform close to Tisza whose publisher is Magyar’s brother, suggested in an article that Fidesz will try to link Miskolczi to a high-level corruption scandal in the Hungarian National Bank, where her husband worked as a legal advisor. The Financial Times on Wednesday reported the Kremlin had endorsed a plan by a communications agency under western sanctions to support Fidesz in the election, including by targeting controversial Tisza candidates. The objective of such smear campaigns “is to push us as far as possible and break us, or force us to give up,” Tarr said, adding the muckraking also targets family members and takes a psychological toll. “They are singling out some of us in the hope that one might resign,” he added.

Hackers from the Kremlin have mounted a “large-scale global cyber campaign” targeting civil servants, military personnel and other notable figures via messaging applications WhatsApp and Signal, Dutch intelligence services warned on Monday. The Russian operation aims to trick victims into revealing PIN codes for secure messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp, the Netherlands’ military intelligence service and domestic intelligence agency said in a joint public advisory. The bulletin did not indicate when the deception campaign began. Hackers are posing as a fake Signal support chatbot to persuade users to share their codes, allowing them to take over an account to read incoming communications and group chats. The culprits were also found to have exploited the “linked devices” feature of the apps, which lets them connect another device to the victim’s account and quietly monitor messages. The campaign has targeted government personnel as well as individuals of interest to the Russian government, including journalists, the Dutch authorities said. They also emphasized that individual accounts have been compromised, not the messaging apps as a whole. Signal is used widely by public officials as a secure and independent communications channel, and has been the recommended application for EU officials to use for external comms since 2020. “Despite their end-to-end encryption option, messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp should not be used as channels for classified, confidential or sensitive information,” said the director of the Dutch military intelligence service, Peter Reesink. United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other top U.S. officials came under fire last year for using the app to exchange classified information in an incident known as Signalgate. WhatsApp’s communication director, Joshua Breckman, said the company continues “to build ways to protect people from online threats ,” adding that users should never share their six-digit code with others. Signal did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Russian government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

LONDON — British police arrested four men Friday on suspicion of aiding Iranian intelligence services. The Metropolitan Police said the four had been detained as part of a counter-terror investigation, and were suspected of surveilling “locations and individuals linked to the Jewish community in the London area.” They have been arrested under Britain’s National Security Act, which covers conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service. “The country to which the investigation relates is Iran,” the force said. The men include one Iranian and three dual British-Iranian nationals. They were arrested in the early hours of Friday morning at addresses in Barnet and Watford “as part of a pre-planned operation,” the Met said. The Met’s head of counter-terrorism policing in London, Helen Flanagan, said the arrests were “part of a long-running investigation and part of our ongoing work to disrupt malign activity where we suspect it.” “We understand the public may be concerned, in particular the Jewish community, and as always, I would ask them to remain vigilant and if they see or hear anything that concerns them, then to contact us,” she added. The arrests come amid heightened vigilance in the U.K. over the possibility of Iranian reprisals after the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran, setting off a broader conflict across the Middle East.

Germany’s data privacy authority on Thursday warned it can’t properly protect citizens from surveillance by the country’s intelligence services, right as Germany is moving to fortify its intelligence agency with sweeping new powers. “Citizens have virtually no means of defending themselves against intelligence measures that can deeply intrude on their privacy,” Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider, the head of the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI), warned after a court ruled against the commissioner’s request to get data on espionage activities. Germany is drafting laws to give its intelligence services vast new powers, in a historic shift that breaks with decades of strict limits on its espionage abilities, rooted in the country’s Nazi and Cold War past. Berlin’s plan to empower intelligence services comes as European leaders grow increasingly concerned that U.S. President Donald Trump could move to halt American intelligence sharing with Europe. To keep German spies in check, the country’s privacy regulator started a legal challenge against the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) after it refused to share details of how it hacked electronic devices of foreigners abroad and gathered data. On Thursday, an administrative court ruled the privacy regulator didn’t have legal standing to pursue the case, redirecting it to file a complaint with Germany’s chancellery instead. The ruling means “areas free from oversight will emerge” within German spy agencies, Specht-Riemenschneider said, calling the agencies’ data processing practices “secretive.” Germany’s BND has historically been far more legally constrained than intelligence agencies elsewhere, due to intentional protections put in place after World War II to prevent a repeat of the abuses perpetrated by the Nazi spy and security services Gestapo and SS. The agency was put under the oversight of the chancellery and bound to a strict parliamentary control mechanism. Germany’s stringent data protection laws — which are also largely a reaction to the legacy of the East German secret police, or Stasi — restrict the BND further. The agency must, for instance, redact personal information in documents before passing them on to other intelligence services, POLITICO reported. The German government is now reviewing those constraints and preparing an overhaul of intelligence powers. Chancellor Friedrich Merz wants to boost and unfetter his country’s foreign intelligence service, giving it much broader authority to perpetrate acts of sabotage, conduct offensive cyber operations and more aggressively carry out espionage. Specht-Riemenschneider called on legislators to amend intelligence laws to make sure her authority can challenge agencies’ data processing, because the spy agency “can now effectively decide for itself what I am allowed to inspect and what I can therefore monitor,” she said. Spy services across Europe have also started to build a shared intelligence operation to counter Russian aggression. The push for deeper intelligence cooperation accelerated sharply after the Trump administration abruptly halted the sharing of battlefield intelligence with Kyiv last March. The BND did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

LONDON — Three men were arrested in London and Wales Wednesday on suspicion of assisting the Chinese foreign intelligence service. Counter-terrorism police arrested a 39-year-old man in London, and a 68-year-old man and 43-year-old man in Wales, the Metropolitan Police said in a statement. According to BBC and Guardian reports, one of the men arrested is the partner of a Labour MP. “Today’s arrests are part of a proactive investigation and while these are serious matters, we do not believe there to be any imminent or direct threat to the public relating to this,” the Met’s London counter-terror lead Helen Flanagan said. “Our investigation continues, and we thank the public for their ongoing support,” she added. Security Minister Dan Jarvis told the House of Commons that the arrests related to foreign interference targeting U.K. democracy. British officials have lodged a diplomatic complaint with Chinese counterparts in London and Beijing about the allegations and raised “strong concerns,” he said. “If there is proven evidence of attempts by China to interfere with U.K. sovereign affairs, we will impose severe consequences and hold all actors involved to account,” he said. This developing story is being updated.

LONDON — The Iranian regime is warning it will attack European cities in any country that joins Donald Trump’s military operation and governments across the region are stepping up security in response. So far, Iranian drones have already targeted Cyprus, with one striking a British Royal Air Force base on the island, and others shot down before they could hit. That prompted the U.K., France and Greece to send jets, warships and helicopters to Cyprus to protect the country from further drone attacks. But with the British, French and German leaders saying they are ready to launch defensive military action in the Middle East, Tehran threatened to retaliate against these countries with attacks on European soil. “It would be an act of war. Any such act against Iran would be regarded as complicity with the aggressors. It would be regarded as an act of war against Iran,” Esmail Baghaei, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, told Iranian state media. Mark Rutte, the former Dutch Prime Minister who now leads NATO, warned on Tuesday that Tehran posed a threat that reached deep into Europe. “Let’s be absolutely clear-eyed to what’s happening here,” Rutte said. “Iran is close to getting its hands on a nuclear capability and on a ballistic missile capability, which is posing a threat not only to the region — the Middle East, including posing an existential threat to Israel — it is also posing a huge threat to us here in Europe.” Iran is “an exporter of chaos” responsible over decades for terrorist plots and assassination attempts, including against people living on European soil, he said.  Here, POLITICO sets out what Iran is capable of, and where European countries may be at greatest risk.  MISSILES AIMED AT ATHENS AND EVEN BERLIN According to reports, Iran has been developing an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 10,000 kilometers, which would put European and even American territory potentially within range, said Antonio Giustozzi from the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London. It is not clear whether, under constant attack, Tehran would be able to manufacture and deploy an experimental missile like this, he said.  “Realistically, the further away you fire them, the less precise they will be,” Giustozzi told POLITICO. “Let’s say they had four or five long-range missiles. There may be some value to target something in Europe just to create some excitement and scare public opinion from intervening.”  Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal is known to include several medium-range systems that stretch to roughly 2,000 kilometers, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Missile Threat database. The solid-fueled Sejjil and Khorramshahr missiles are both assessed to have about that range, which would extend to parts of southeastern Europe from Iranian territory, including areas of Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, depending on the launch location. Romania has a U.S. missile shield site at Deveselu in the southern part of the country which was built to intercept potential missile attacks from Iran. This week, military security was stepped up at the site, according to Romania’s defense minister.  Tehran has long described 2,000 kilometers as a self-imposed ceiling for its ballistic missile program — a limit that keeps most of Europe outside of the envelope while preserving regional reach.  Defence Express, a Kyiv-based defense consultancy group, said the Khorramshahr missile may be capable of hitting targets 3,000 kilometers away if it was fitted with a lighter warhead, potentially bringing Berlin and Rome within range. However, the number of such long-range missiles in Iran’s arsenal is unlikely to be large.  ‘SHAHED’ DRONES AND TOYS PACKED WITH EXPLOSIVES  Iran has invested heavily in drone development and production, and these uncrewed projectiles may be its best flexible weapon. Iran’s “Shahed” drones have been deployed by Russian forces since the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These one-way attack drones have a range claimed to be as much as 2,500 kilometers.  To reach targets inside European territory they would need to fly at low altitude across countries such as Turkey and Jordan, though Cyprus has already found out it is within range. Analysts believe the drone that hit U.K.’s RAF Akrotiri air base in Cyprus was likely a shahed-type, and may have been fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy.  But Giustozzi said commercially available drones — even toys — could be used to cause havoc inside Europe. Iran is known to have a network of sleeper agents operating across many countries in Europe, he said, who use criminal groups to carry out attacks.  They could be tasked with a coordinated effort to fly drones over civilian airports, forcing flights to be halted and causing chaos to air traffic across Europe, he said. This would be cheap and easy to do. More ambitious attacks could include striking military targets with drones loaded with explosives. A residential building and cars are damaged by a Shahed drone attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, last month. The drones have been deployed by Russian forces since the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. | Pavlo Pakhomenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images But such risk may be low, Giustozzi said, as Iran may not have been able to smuggle bomb making components into European countries as this has not been its primary mode of operation in the region in recent years.  HIT SQUADS AND TERRORISTS  Tehran’s recent focus has been on intimidating and targeting people and groups who are critical of the regime, particularly among the large Iranian diaspora dispersed widely across European countries, according to analysts.  According to an intelligence summary from one Western government, Iran has a long record of plots to assassinate and attack targets inside Europe. Its state-sponsored terrorism involves a mix of direct operations by Iranian forces and, according to the intelligence summary, a growing reliance on organized criminal gangs to maintain “plausible deniability.”  In the past decade, incidents have included the arrest of Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi for providing explosives to a couple tasked with bombing a large rally of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). Assadi was sentenced to 20 years in prison.  After massive cyberattacks against state infrastructure, the Albanian government formally severed all ties with Iran in 2022. Four years earlier, Albania expelled the Iranian ambassador and several diplomats for plotting a truck bomb attack against an Iranian dissident camp. The Dutch government accused Iran of involvement in the targeted killing of two dissidents, in 2015 and 2017.  Suspected Iranian-backed assassination plots and other attacks have also been reported in Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Sweden, and the U.K., among other countries in Europe.  CYBER ATTACKS  The threat to Europeans from Iran is not just physical, with the regime long being regarded as a capable actor in cyber warfare.   Experts and officials warned Iran could launch fresh cyber operations against Europe in the wake of the war started by the U.S. and Israel, either by targeting governments directly or by hitting critical infrastructure operators.  “We have to monitor now the situation very carefully when it comes to our cyber security and especially our critical infrastructure,” European Commission Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen told POLITICO. “We know that the online dimension is also very important, the recruiting channel and especially the propaganda is also spread very much online.” Iran is typically seen as one of the big four cyber adversaries to the West — alongside Russia, China and North Korea. So far, however, there is little evidence to suggest it’s actively targeting Europe. In fact, Iran’s cyber activity has largely stopped since the U.S. bombing began, according to one senior European cybersecurity official, granted anonymity to discuss ongoing assessments.  If and when European countries make their support for U.S. and Israeli activities more explicit, that will likely draw them into the firing line, cyber industry officials said. “Europe should definitely expect that exactly what happened in the Gulf could happen and should happen in Europe,” said Gil Messing, chief of staff at Israeli cyber firm Check Point. EU Commissioner Henna Virkkunen spoke of the need to monitor cyber security and especially critical infrastructure. | Thierry Monasse/Getty Images Messing said his firm is already seeing evidence of cyberattacks in Cyprus, the only EU country that Iran has targeted with physical attacks so far. There’s no evidence of attacks in other European countries but it’s likely coming down the tracks, he said. And if attacks do take place, Iran’s capabilities, though lessened in recent years, remain significant, experts said. Iran’s security and intelligence services have cyber units comprising hundreds of people, with tens of millions of dollars of funding, Messing said. “If the regime lasts,” the senior official quoted above said, “they will be back.” Victor Goury-Laffont, Laura Kayali, Antoaneta Roussi, Joshua Berlinger and Sebastian Starcevic contributed reporting.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is celebrating a “major victory” in courts after judges in Cologne banned Germany’s domestic intelligence agency from treating the party as a “right-wing extremist group.” The temporary ruling issued Thursday prevents the BfV agency from using the label it slapped on the AfD in May 2025 — a mostly symbolic decision that nevertheless complicated the party’s efforts to broaden its appeal at home and polish its reputation abroad. AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla hailed a “great day for democracy,” while his co-head Alice Weidel wrote on X that the ruling “indirectly put a stop to censorship fanatics.” Weidel has seized on the ruling as evidence the party was unfairly stigmatized and is now using the court’s intervention to support her party’s broader rebranding. The AfD has shifted steadily rightward since its founding in 2013 as a Euroskeptic force, mobilizing an increasingly radicalized base largely around migration. Lately, however, Weidel has tried to tone down the rhetoric to make her party more palatable to mainstream conservatives. It is currently moving to ban Kevin Dorow, a board member of its youth organisation, for remarks that “obviously suggested a closeness to National Socialism”, Die Welt reported. The strategy could test the long-standing firewall that has kept Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right bloc from governing with the far right. A good electoral result in the state of Baden-Württemberg next week could signal that these efforts are paying off. AfD has not performed well historically in the southwestern state, and its candidates are currently polling in third with 19 percent, much higher than its nine percent result five years ago. The party also enjoys some momentum in Berlin, where an Insa survey put the AfD in second place with 17 percent — the first time the party has ranked so highly in the city-state, although it is neck and neck with three parties on the left ahead of the elections in September. The legal fight is far from over, though. Speaking to Welt TV on Friday, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the AfD “remains a suspected case” — a status that still allows Germany’s domestic intelligence agency to monitor the party — and stressed that the main proceedings in the case still lie ahead. A final court decision could take years. Nette Nöstlinger contributed to this report.