General Discussion

BUDAPEST — In the run-up to Hungary’s pivotal election in April, a unit of Russia’s foreign intelligence service last month began sounding the alarm over plummeting public support for Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose friendly ties to Moscow have long given the Kremlin a strategic foothold inside NATO and the European Union.

Officers from the intelligence service, or SVR, suggested that drastic action might be necessary — a strategy they called “the Gamechanger.” In an internal report for the SVR obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post, the operatives proposed a way to “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign” — “the staging of an assassination attempt on Viktor Orban.”

“Such an incident will shift the perception of the campaign out of the rational realm of socioeconomic questions into an emotional one, where the key themes will become state security and the stability and defense of the political system,” the operatives wrote in a report prepared for the SVR’s main unit for political influence operations, Directorate MS, or Active Measures Department.

Snip

The July 2024 campaign-trail attack in which Donald Trump was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet resulted in iconic photos of him, praise for his resilience, and a quick bump in his poll numbers, especially among core supporters.