Hungary is accused of spying for the EU. The European Commission will set up a group to investigate

The European Commission will set up a special group to investigate information about spy operations by Hungary's intelligence service against EU officials. This was stated at a briefing on October 9 by the European Commission's representative Balázs Uzhvari, Interfax-Ukraine.

He said that Europe has taken into account all the reports on this issue and taken the information seriously.

"We remain committed to protecting the Commission's personnel, information and networks from illegal intelligence gathering activities. This is an operational security matter, so I can't comment much, but I can say that we will set up an internal team to investigate these allegations," Uzhvari said .

This is a joint investigation by the German newspaper Spiegel, the Belgian newspaper De Tijd, and the Hungarian independent group Direkt36. The journalists came to the conclusion that one of the spies was a certain V., who was sent to Brussels in 2015-2017 and was under diplomatic cover.

His boss was the Hungarian ambassador to the EU at the time, Oliver Varghese, who is now the European Commissioner.

The spy allegedly tried to recruit a European Commission official, and was interested not only in political affairs but also in all sorts of rumors and gossip. The meetings took place every few months. According to the journalists' interlocutor, V. proposed ideas according to which there would be more Hungarians in the EU structures, and then even offered money for cooperation, but the official allegedly refused.

According to the investigation, Hungary put pressure on its "spies" and demanded results, which led some of them to communicate through unprotected channels. This likely led to the group's exposure in 2017 .

Two other agents also operated in the EU, spying on investigators from the European Anti-Fraud Office. This structure was supposed to investigate corruption allegations against a company owned by the son-in-law of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and receiving government contracts.

• on May 9, the SBU reported that for the first time in Ukraine's history, had exposed Hungarian military intelligence agents, who were spying in Zakarpattia region. Zelensky said that spies were not discovered for the first time, just "solved quietly".
• On July 22, it was reported that in Britain, a man offered "Russian intelligence" data on the former minister, he was found guilty of helping foreign intelligence.
• On September 17, it became known that Latvian spied on military facilities for Russia. He was also interested in NATO soldiers.