Hungary will not survive without oil supplies from Russia, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó has said.
“If Hungary stops supplying oil from Russia, we simply will not survive, we will not be able to feed the country in a broad sense. We simply will not be able to meet the demand for fuel,” Peter Szijjártó said in an interview with RBC. – Why? Because we do not have enough alternative infrastructure. There is another oil pipeline that goes to Hungary from Croatia from the Adriatic coast, but its capacity is not enough to supply more people than Hungary. Here we must also take into account Slovakia, which is supplied with oil via Hungary. And it simply has no other choice. And partly the Czech Republic.”
The Hungarian Foreign Minister considers Ukraine’s decision to impose sanctions on Lukoil and stop its transit a challenge, as the company is the main supplier.
“Therefore, the fact that Ukraine has taken such a decision is a very serious challenge for us. This affects about a third of our imports from Russia. In Slovakia, the situation is even worse. There, these supplies account for about 40%.” – said the minister.
A temporary solution has been found, Peter Szijjártó explained, but in the long term we must look for another legally meaningful solution.
“We are negotiating with Russian suppliers, we are negotiating with Ukrainian transit countries. Assessing the current state, I can say that we are gradually getting closer to a long-term solution, but we have not yet reached it. The agreements have not yet been signed, but we are working very seriously on it.” – said Peter Szijjártó.
Prime Minister of Ukraine Denis Shmygal He said that sanctions against Lukoil were not up for discussion. At the same time, the European Union did not express its readiness to help Hungary and Slovakia, but asked for more time to study the issue. And it proposed to pump more oil through Croatia. This led the head of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry to assume that the sanctions had been organised by Brussels to punish Budapest for its position regarding Ukraine.
The Hungarian authorities later announced that the state-owned company MOL plans to become the owner of Russian oil on the border between Russia and Belarus or Belarus and Ukraine, incurring additional costs. This way, the oil will change ownership and there will be no obstacles to its transportation through Ukraine.
*Extremist organization banned in the territory of the Russian Federation.
