Latveria had seen an unprecedented torrent of armor. Mechanized forces of every kind marched from the ruined royal city toward the northern border. No matter how slow the surrounding nations had been to react, they were now urgently deploying troops to defensive positions along their borders with Latveria. Hungary, for instance, used two Antonov An-26 transport planes to carry Hungarian Defence Forces and border guard soldiers to the border, while also dispatching five Mi-17 multirole helicopters and two JAS 39 Gripen fighters from Szolnok Air Base to reconnoiter Latveria. Unsurprisingly, all of those aircraft were shot down by mobile anti-air bases and missile vehicles Victor von Doom had positioned in the mountains along Latveria's border.
Every communication request sent by Hungary vanished without a trace. Some radical generals in the Orbán Government, backed by right-wing populist parties such as Fidesz–Hungarian Civic Alliance, even clamored, "This is an act of war," urging Budapest to resolve to invade the small agricultural nation of Latveria and occupy it completely. Hungary had a standing force of a full hundred thousand troops. Under normal circumstances, it should have been able to crush the Latverian resistance with ease. Yet when intelligence from frontline reconnaissance arrived, even the most hot-tempered Hungarian generals fell silent.
Latveria made no effort to conceal its possession of nuclear weapons and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. It even allowed U.S. military spy satellites to photograph its air-defense positions before dispatching Void Fighters to shoot them down. Although the United States' nuclear-sharing policy supplied nuclear weapons to NATO members that had not developed their own, those were still someone else's weapons of mass destruction. Their own neighbor, meanwhile, had already put a knife to their throats. They could only hurriedly transport air-defense missile systems to the border and seek assistance from U.S. military bases within