BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó Tuesday accused the European Union’s executive commission of orchestrating a stoppage of some Russian oil supplies into the bloc through Ukraine and warned that the dispute could lead to an energy crisis.
Ukraine last month adopted sanctions against Lukoil — Russia’s largest non-state firm — which prohibited the transit of its oil across the Druzhba or “Friendship” pipeline through Ukraine and into Hungary and Slovakia. Hungary receives most of its crude from Russia, about half of which comes from Lukoil.
The move angered officials in Slovakia and Hungary, which argued the blocked supply would endanger their energy security. The two countries threatened legal action against Kyiv unless Lukoil’s crude is allowed to resume its deliveries.
On Tuesday, Szijjártó blasted the EU’s executive commission in a post on Facebook, writing that it had “done nothing” in the week since Budapest and Bratislava asked it to intervene in the oil dispute.
“Despite the threat to the energy security of two EU Member States … Brussels remains silent,” Szijjártó wrote, adding that either the commission is too “weak” to protect the interests of Slovakia and Hungary or “it was Brussels, not Kyiv, that invented the whole thing.”
“The European Commission, and President Ursula von der Leyen personally, must come clean immediately: did Brussels ask Kyiv to ban oil supplies?” Szijjártó wrote. “And if not, why has the European Commission taken no action in more than a week?”
He echoed earlier Hungarian claims that the blocking of Lukoil transfers across Ukraine was “blackmail” for Hungary’s advocacy of an immediate cease-fire and peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv, a position that many EU and NATO leaders have criticized as an appeasement strategy toward Russia despite its invasion.
Hungary’s right-wing populist government, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is considered the Kremlin’s closest EU partner, and has broken with the bloc’s other countries by refusing to provide Ukraine with weapons to defend against Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Orbán has routinely delayed, watered down or blocked efforts to send financial aid to Kyiv and impose sanctions on Moscow over its war, and has conducted an adversarial foreign policy with Hungary’s war-ravaged neighbor.
The EU in 2022 passed sanctions on the import of Russian oil into the bloc in response to the launch of the war, though an exception was granted to land-locked Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to allow them time to find other crude sources.
Last week, Orbán’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyás, said that blocking Lukoil deliveries could result in fuel shortages, but insisted that there was “no reason to panic” since Hungary still had reserves. Still, he added, Hungary would seek a solution to the impasse before September.
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