The Conservative Partnership Institute, a nerve center for incubating policies for a second Trump administration, co-sponsored a discussion in October 2022 about how to bring “peace in Ukraine” featuring Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter Szijjarto.
Audience members included conservative policy and national security officials and GOP strategists, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Once seated, they were given pamphlets pushing unabashedly pro-Russia talking points.
“Russia has the will, strength, and patience to continue war,” warned the document, which was given to POLITICO by a participant. “U.S aid to Ukraine must be severely constricted and Ukrainian President Zelensky should be encouraged by U.S. leadership to seek armistice and concede Ukraine as a neutral country.”
“If the U.S. continues to enable war, it will result in the destruction of Ukraine and provoke further Russian aggression toward the West, with the potential for nuclear conflict,” it said.
Months before, Russian President Vladimir Putin had awarded Szijjarto an Order of Friendship medal, the highest Russian state decoration that can be given to a foreigner.
The discussion, which CPI held in partnership with another conservative nonprofit called the Counterpoint Institute, was an early part of what’s become a far broader initiative by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to expand his influence around the world. It has included his repeated overtures to former President Donald Trump, who praised Orbán in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in late July.
The Hungarian message is of concern to mainstream Republican foreign-policy officials, past and present, because it seems to be a vehicle for an ongoing influence campaign over Trump and the many groups that are seeking his favor as he battles with Vice President Kamala Harris this fall to regain the American presidency. While Trump, during his time in the White House from 2017-2021, often expressed his personal respect for Putin, the war in Ukraine has made an open relationship between the two diplomatically untenable. Orbán, according to the former GOP officials, is stepping into the void. He has visited Trump in Florida twice this year.
It has grown to include transatlantic conferences, U.S. journalist “influencers” paid with Hungarian money and a formal agreement struck last year between a think tank funded by Orbán’s Fidesz Party, the Danube Institute, and The Heritage Foundation, another policy nerve center hoping to steer a second Trump administration.
Hungary’s attempts to influence the policy debate in Washington are echoing right now in Brussels, where Orbán’s followers have seeded several anti-European Union, right-leaning media outlets and think tanks, the best known of which is MCC Brussels. Launched in 2022, the think tank is funded by Orbán’s government, and the prime minister’s political director, Balazs Orban, who is not related, chairs its board of trustees. MCC has led campaigns seeking to undermine EU action on climate change and backing farmer protests which rocked the EU capital last year.
While many of the overtures to U.S. conservatives are ostensibly about policies like global migration and promoting religious values, the message often quickly turns to pro-Russian foreign policy goals. They include curbing Western support for Ukraine and, implicitly, weakening support for NATO.
For his part, Orbán is seeking to maintain a steady flow of business between his country and Russia. Even while taking in hundreds of billions of dollars as a member of the EU, Orbán’s government has increasingly relied on major investments from the West’s leading adversaries: Russia and its ally China.
China was the single biggest investor in Hungary in 2023, including a belt and road cooperation agreement and numerous battery factories. Recently, POLITICO reported that Hungary quietly borrowed $1 billion from three Chinese banks last spring, the largest loan Budapest has ever taken out.
In May, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, gave a floor speech bashing Hungary for its growing ties with authoritarian powers hostile to the West.
“The details of China’s growing influence in Budapest should raise red flags,” said McConnell.
With Orbán now holding the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, former GOP national security experts and officials say these conflicts are more visible than ever. Orbán told U.S. activists two years ago that he had “perfected the recipe” for an “illiberal state,” which he wanted to share with other governments. Last month, Orbán publicly claimed to be helping the Trump campaign to draft policy.
CPI itself is a major arm of Trump’s MAGA movement raising significant sums of money. Its roster includes some of Trump’s most ardent loyalists, such as Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.The Heritage Foundation, whose president, Kevin Roberts, calls Orbán’s leadership a “model for conservative governance,” has openly lobbied for influence in a future Trump administration through its Project 2025 and played a lead role in lobbying Congress to end congressional funding to Ukraine.
“They [Orbán allies] say things people want to hear about issues they care about. It’s ‘woke this and woke that,’ and then they pressure them with what they really want,” which is to end the Ukraine war on Putin’s terms, said a person familiar with the meetings who still works in government and asked for anonymity to speak freely about the situation.
That person isamong many members of the more hawkish Republican foreign-policy establishment who said they were concerned about how Orbán is manipulating MAGA themes to achieve Orbán’s pro-Russian aims.
The pamphlet distributed at the “peace in Ukraine” conference illustrates how “corrupt authoritarians are accessing and abusing our system to undermine U.S. national security,” said Kristofer Harrison, who was a Defense and State Department adviser during the George W. Bush administration.
Ian Brzezinski, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO policy under Bush, said of the pamphlet: “It looks like it was written by the Kremlin.”
Orbán is one “tool” of a broader Russian influence campaign that’s reached deep into Washington’s corridors of power, said Brzezinski. He pointed to the recent comments from the House Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committee chairs, both Republicans, that Russian propaganda has influenced the party’s base.
Over the last month, Trump has tried to distance himself from The Heritage Foundation and its efforts to plan for the next Republican administration.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he said in July on his Truth Social site. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
The Trump campaign reiterated that only the campaign speaks for Trump’s policies, but it did not comment on whether Trump is aware of Hungarian-aligned think tanks that may be advocating for Russian interests.
Counterpoint, CPI and The Heritage Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
Some right-leaning foreign policy scholars and some former Republican national security officials say Heritage’s cooperation with Danube — and CPI’s conference with Counterpoint — illustrate how Orbán’s allies have leveraged nonprofits to inject Russian talking points into the Republican agenda. It’s unclear who funds Counterpoint, which took in under $50,000 in 2023.
Orbán Political Director Balazs Orbán said in an emailed statement that he does not wish to participate in granting “legitimacy” to this story by answering questions about whether Hungarian think tanks are advancing the interests of Russia through collaborations with U.S. think tanks. But Orban the prime minister is publicly confident about his influence over Trump.
Late last month, Viktor Orbán claimed in a speech that Hungary has “deep involvement” in the “programme-writing system of President Donald Trump’s team.” He opened by warning that if Europe does not change its policy of “supporting the war” by financially backing Ukraine, then “after Trump’s victory it will have to do so while admitting defeat, covered in shame.”
Harrison, the former Bush administration adviser, suggested that the Hungarian government is leveraging its role as a global intermediary for practical reasons more than a commitment to global conservatism.
“Orbán carries water for Russia because they’re the highest bidder,” said Harrison. “Same with China,” he said, referring to billions that China is investing in Hungary.
“I think of [Orbán] as a super-lobbyist, with the kind of influence that a K Street lobbyist could only dream to have,” said Harrison.
Princeton Prof. Kim Scheppele, an expert on Hungary who has done research at both the Hungarian andRussian Constitutional Courts, pointed out that Orbán is holding international conferences and using his opposition to LGBTQ rights and “pro-family” platform to cultivate ties with the American right.
“Orbán is selling himself as Mr. Christian Europe” but “what’s happening between Russia and Hungary is under the surface,” Scheppele said. Orbán casts his “peace mission” advocacy for quickly ending the war as his “Christian duty.” But critics, including Scheppele, say the culture in Hungary stands in contrast to the public profile Orbán seeks to promote as Europe’s defender of Christianity.
Since Orbán took over in 2011, religious affiliation in Hungary has dropped to a record low, with Catholic Church membership suffering the steepest declines, at 30 percent.
Orbán’s opposition to sending arms to Ukraine, sanctioning Russian entities and individuals and letting Kyiv start the process of joining the pro-Western bloc are notorious in EU circles, where Orbán is tolerated as a “bad boy” among EU leaders — coming up to the brink of serious sanction by the bloc, but rarely if ever crossing over it.
In the U.S., however, he has a new legion of fans. With Trump’s open embrace of Orbán, those seeking to cultivate ties to the next GOP administration are eager to advertise their own pro-Hungary bona fides.
The Danube Institute has gained enough high-level access on the conservative right that its executive director, Istvan Kiss, a former Orbán adviser, recently spoke on the floor of the Tennessee Senate. American writers close to Danube include Rod Dreher, who’s been paid by Danube to publish articles in U.S. media and has promoted “American Orbanism.” Dreher did not respond to an email seeking comment.
In an emailed response, Kiss rejected the characterization of Danube as advocating a pro-Russian perspective. He cited Danube research papers “critical of Russia” and events Danube has hosted, including one titled “Why Ukraine Needs to Win the Russia-Ukraine War” featuring David Satter, a “foremost critic of Vladimir Putin.”
“This is not the first insinuation about our institute spreading Russian propaganda,” he said in the email. “Our institute has been very objective regarding the assessment and coverage of the war in Ukraine and, if anything, we were actually more pro-Ukraine than anything else,” said Kiss, noting there is no financial arrangement with Heritage.
Danube’s president, John O’Sullivan, is a respected conservative thought leader and former speechwriter for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He is also a former Heritage director who has been described by author Jacob Heilbrunn as “Orbán’s conduit to the American right.” Danube gets its money from the Batthyany Foundation, which has become one of the main sources of public funding for pro-Fidesz Party organizations and has become “one of the main tools of the Orbán government’s ideological expansion abroad.”
At Heritage, the ties to Danube became formal when in March of last year the two groups signed a “landmark cooperation agreement” which encourages “the transmission of ideas and people.” For instance, the two think tanks are co-hosting geopolitical summits, including one last October. Two months later, Heritage hosted a two-day private conference that brought together Republican lawmakers and Orbán allies pushing for an end to U.S. military support in Ukraine.
A few months ago, Heritage’s Roberts, while noting his organization has not taken any money from Orbán’s government, said Heritage is nevertheless “especially proud” of its relationship with Orbán, whose “leadership in Hungary on immigration, family policy and the importance of the nation-state is a model for conservative governance.”
Of any foreign leader, Trump is arguably closest to Orbán. He calls Orbán his “friend” and a “great man.” In accepting the GOP nomination in Milwaukee, Trump singled out Orbán as a “very tough man” and noted that Orbán credits him for keeping world peace because everybody “was afraid” of Trump.
The admiration is mutual. Hungary, which recently assumed the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, is using as its slogan “Make Europe Great Again.”
Trump’s Orbán embrace sparks some US Republicans to sound the alarm
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