Serbia’s top military brass said Ukraine was not behind an incident involving explosives near a gas pipeline with Hungary, in a rebuke to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who heavily implied Kyiv was involved.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, a close ally of Orbán, said Sunday that authorities found “an explosive of devastating power” near a gas pipeline transporting Russian gas from the country to its neighbor Hungary, a week before Hungary’s general election on April 12.
Orbán said Sunday after convening an emergency meeting of the National Defense Council that the Serbian authorities had uncovered a “sabotage operation” in Vojvodina, Serbia and seemingly linked it to Ukraine, which he said had been “working for years to cut Europe off from Russian energy” and posed “a direct threat to Hungary,” though he did not formally accuse Kyiv.
But Đuro Jovanić, director of Belgrade’s counterintelligence Military Security Agency (VBA), said Sunday evening it was “not true that the Ukrainians tried to organize” the plot, which involved “explosives specially packaged, hermetically sealed, detonator caps.”
