A Familiar False Flag Op in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia?
Orbán, Russia, and the Manufacture of Ethnic Tensions
Hungary’s pro-Russian leader Viktor Orbán has posted on Facebook that a church was set on fire in Transcarpathia, a Ukrainian region home to a small ethnic Hungarian minority, and that the words “Hungarians to the knife” were scrawled on its walls.
Ukrainian police have confirmed the incident:
On 16 July, at around 10 pm EEST, police received a report of a fire at a church in the village of Palad-Komarivtsi, Uzhhorod district. […]
During the initial investigation, law enforcement officers determined that an unidentified individual had entered the church, set fire to the front door, and painted provocative slogans on the building’s façade, aimed at inciting national and religious hatred. […]
At present, police officers, in cooperation with the Security Service of Ukraine, are carrying out operational measures to identify those involved in the crime.
Given the pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian activities of the current Hungarian regime, it comes as no surprise that, in the same Facebook post, Orbán has attempted to link the incident to the Ukrainian government.
Considering the nature of the Hungarian authorities, their blatant efforts to assist Russia in undermining Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and relevant historical precedents, it is reasonable to suggest that the 16 July incident may have been orchestrated by agents of either the Orbán regime or Moscow.
For historical context, it is important to recall a similar incident that took place in Transcarpathia (quoting from my book Russian Political Warfare):
In the early morning hours of 4 February 2018, two Polish far-right activists, Adrian Marglewski and Tomasz Rafał Szymkowiak, attacked a building of the Hungarian Cultural Centre in the Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod [...]. The two activists tried to set the building on fire and reported their efforts to a third Polish national, yet another far-right activist named Michał Prokopowicz [...].
The aim of Marglewski and Szymkowiak was not simply to set the building on fire; rather, the main objective was to present the arson as a result of the attack of Ukrainian neo-Nazis in order to sour relations between Hungary and Ukraine. To that end, as instructed by Prokopowicz, the two perpetrators also painted swastikas and the number 88 (a neo-Nazi code standing for “Heil Hitler”) on the walls of the Hungarian Cultural Centre. It was meant to be a typical false-flag attack.
Ukrainian law enforcement identified the perpetrators, and the Polish [security services] arrested all three activists on 22 February 2018. During the investigation, Prokopowicz confessed that the entire operation had been commissioned by [German pro-Russian journalist] Manuel Ochsenreiter.
According to Prokopowicz, Ochsenreiter would pay €1,500 to hire five people to carry out the attack in Ukraine, but Prokopowicz was able to find only two. Ochsenreiter paid Prokopowicz €500 in advance, while the rest was paid after the execution of the operation at a restaurant in the Tegel airport area where the two met on 7 February 2018. [...]
In January 2019, the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation into incitement to serious arson against Ochsenreiter. The latter, however, disappeared. [On 18 August 2021, Ochsenreiter died of a heart attack in Moscow]
Highly likely to be an anti-Ukrainian false-flag operation, the attack in Transcarpathia on 16 July 2025 appears to serve two main purposes and address two distinct audiences.
The first audience is Hungarian society. Orbán’s party, Fidesz, is rapidly losing popularity and is on track to lose power after 15 years of rule, during which it has effectively turned Hungary into a mafia state.
By playing the anti-Ukrainian card, the Orbán regime is attempting to draw on nationalist sentiment and present itself as the main defender of Hungarians both inside and outside the country. It is a classic tactic of failing autocrats, and Orbán is simply following the playbook.
The second audience is the MAGA movement in the US, where the Trump administration has recently reversed its position on military assistance to Ukraine – to the benefit of Ukraine.
The MAGA movement is particularly sensitive to religious issues, and Russian operatives have already succeeded in convincing large segments of it that Ukraine is supposedly an anti-Christian country.
Thus, the anti-Hungarian graffiti is aimed at pro-Orbán mobilisation within Hungary, while the arson attack on the church is intended to activate the religious elements of the MAGA movement in order to undermine Trump’s recent policy shift on Ukraine.
The actual perpetrators of the incident in Transcarpathia might not necessarily be fully aware of the broader effort they were involved in. As I have discussed recently, Russian operatives increasingly rely on “proxy bombers” – civilians recruited to carry out attacks in Ukraine and beyond, often unwittingly. Such proxies may well have been used in this case.
One hopes that Ukrainian police will soon identify and arrest the perpetrator(s), shedding more light on the operation.