While Orbán flaunts his close ties with the Kremlin, his electoral rival, Péter Magyar, has argued this is an Achilles’ heel, accusing the government of “outright treason” over its ties to Moscow. The December summit in Moscow was the 16th meeting of the Russian-Hungarian Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation (IGC), which according to Russian state media was launched in 2005. The commission has met on a roughly annual basis in either Russia or Hungary since then — with a break between the 14th meeting in November 2021 and the 15th in September 2024. Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. According to one of the documents, Russia and Hungary “addressed current issues of bilateral trade and economic cooperation, joint activities in the energy sector, industry, health care, agriculture, construction, and other areas of mutual interest, as well as in the cultural and humanitarian sphere” at the meeting in Moscow on Dec. 9, 2025. They also underscored the importance of “developing long-term, mutually beneficial ties between the two countries in areas of …