With voting on 3 April, the prime minister is seeking to avoid criticism of his pro-Putin policy – and to keep in with the EU
After Russian missiles began falling on Ukraine in the early hours of 24 February, much of Europe’s media reported the bloody details of Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked all-out attack.
In Hungary, however, the state news agency, the Hungarian Telegraph Office (MTI), took a different line. Instead of using the word “war”, it described a “Russian military operation”, wording close to the Kremlin-mandated phrase special military operation. During the first five days of the war, the influential agency referred to a “Russian military operation” (orosz hadművelet) 431 times, according to Zsuzsanna Wirth, a journalist with the investigative media outlet Direkt36, who has studied how the government controls MTI.
