The stars’ trips to Kiev were funded via the US foreign aid system, the Hungarian Prime Minister has claimed
The Hollywood celebrities who visited Ukraine to ‘support’ the country during its ongoing conflict with Russia didn’t do it out of sympathy, but because they were paid millions, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said.
Stars’ trips to Kiev were paid for with money from USAID, Washington’s primary mechanism for funding political projects abroad, Orban said in an interview with Hungarian broadcaster TV2 on Saturday.
“People were given money for their opinions. I am talking about big celebrities and movie stars. They were given money to go to Ukraine, so they did not do it from the heart or out of sympathy for the Ukrainians – which could have actually been the case – but because they were given money,” he said.
The payments received by the stars amounted to “millions of euros or dollars,” the prime minister claimed, without providing any names.
Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, Ben Stiller and Orlando Bloom were among the most prominent Western celebrities to have visited Ukraine since the escalation of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev three years ago.
In early February, reports emerged on social media claiming that Jolie had received $20 million for her trip to Lviv in April 2022, and that Penn, Stiller and Bloom were written checks of $5 million, $4 million and $8 million, respectively, by USAID.
Back then, Stiller rejected the accusations, calling them “lies coming from Russian media.” The actor insisted in a post on X that his visit to Kiev was “self-funded.” Penn’s lawyer also said that reports of his client being paid by USAID to meet with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky were “completely false, misleading and reckless.”
Several Western media outlets, including AFP and Reuters, said that their fact checking teams had found that the claims of stars getting USAID money originated from a fabricated video and that there were no available records of the agency paying the celebrities.
Shortly after taking office, US President Donald Trump launched a clampdown on USAID, accusing it of widespread corruption and inefficiency. He imposed a 90-day funding freeze on the agency and transferred oversight of its programs to the direct control of the US State Department.
Orban said in his interview that the activities of USAID in recent decades could be “the biggest corruption scandal in the history of the Western world.”
“I have never seen anything like this before – when billions of dollars are being transferred from the US budget to foundations and various forms of support, and then they are being distributed around the globe and given to those who represent the ideals, spirituality, programs and specific interests demanded by the Americans, and they receive money for that,” he stressed.
