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Hungary’s new prime minister had been in power for just 12 hours when the first missiles struck Zakarpattia.
For more than four years, while Viktor Orbán was in office, Vladimir Putin held off striking this part of Ukraine, which is home to about 100,000 ethnic Hungarians.
But with his closest ally in Europe now out of power, and Peter Magyar, the new leader, looking to realign Hungary with the EU and Nato, missiles flew more than 1,000 miles into Ukraine and landed just 12 miles from the Hungarian border.
Mukachevo, the regional capital of Zakarpattia, was hit, while Hungarian railway workers at Chop station were evacuated to shelters and later bundled into Hungary.
The message from Moscow could not have been clearer.
“It was a warning shot at the new government,” Péter Krekó, the director of the Political Capital Institute, a Budapest-based think tank, told The Telegraph.
“Orban’s approach was unconditionally pro-Russian: whatever helped Ukraine, Hungary opposed it. Moscow doesn’t want this to change.”
Russia launched more than 800 drones across Ukraine on May 13 in one of the longest mass attacks of the war, targeting critical infrastructure from Kyiv to the far west.
For the first time since the invasion began, that barrage reached Zakarpattia, the region farthest from Russian territory, hitting multiple districts in what the regional governor described as the heaviest assault the area had seen since 2022.
Zakarpattia borders Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. Once home to 150,000 ethnic Hungarians, the number has dropped since the start of the war, but it remains culturally and politically distinct from the rest of the country.
It had been a point of tension between Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, and Mr Orbán for years.
Mr Orbán repeatedly used the Hungarian population as leverage against Kyiv, blocking Ukraine’s EU accession talks and vetoing military aid packages because of what Budapest claimed were violations of the community’s language and education rights.
Mr Orbán and Putin, pictured in 2025, had long been firm allies – ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images
The tactics turned the grievances of a minority population into a political weapon that served Moscow’s interests as much as Budapest’s.
According to experts, Moscow left Zakarpattia untouched from the first day of the invasion as part of an arrangement never formalised but widely understood as part of the tacit agreement between Mr Orbán and Putin that defined four years of Hungarian foreign policy.
“The attack was the end of the Orbán-Putin understanding over protecting ethnic Hungarians in the area,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director, Europe, at Eurasia Group.
Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s outgoing foreign minister, was one of Moscow’s most useful allies in Europe. His leaked phone calls revealed that he once told Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, “I am always at your service.”
In the weeks before he left office, he gave his most candid comments yet on why Zakarpattia had been spared, telling Hungarian media that it was “probably not a coincidence”.
That all changed in April, when Mr Orbán lost power in a landslide to Peter Magyar, a 45-year-old lawyer who had promised to end Hungary’s isolation from its European allies and move the country away from Moscow’s orbit.
“Losing Orbán as an ally in Europe was a notable setback for Moscow, both politically and pragmatically,” said Mr Rahman.
Mr Magyar’s government was formalised on May 12, with Russian Shahed drones hitting Zakarpattia on May 13.
Within hours, Mr Magyar summoned the Russian ambassador, the first time any Hungarian government had taken such a step in response to an attack on Ukrainian soil in the four years since the invasion began.
“It is a real break with the previous approach,” said Mr Krekó. “The line of the Orbán government was that it kept criticising Ukraine and criticising Brussels for being too hawkish, but it did not criticise Russia for this kind of behaviour. And that now seems to be changing quite clearly.”
Mr Krekó added that the strikes on Zakarpattia were Moscow’s way of signalling to Hungarians that their new government could not defend its interests abroad, warning that Hungary should now brace for what its neighbours have long endured.
“Hungary may now start experiencing some of the things that other Nato members in the region have already experienced in recent years,” said Mr Krekó. “Hybrid threats, destabilisation attempts, and similar forms of pressure coming from Russia.”
He said Russia’s miscalculation may send a message to other pro-Moscow governments in the region that “building their political future” around friendship with Putin was “not a stable foundation”.
There is an irony Moscow may not have intended.
The strike that was meant to destabilise Mr Magyar’s government has instead given it something Mr Orbán never had: a reason to stand with Ukraine.
“The Russian strike could actually help lower the tension between Hungary and Ukraine”, said Mr Rahman, “all while raising the temperature with Moscow.”