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.
