Replacing Russian oil imports would take years and cost several hundreds of millions of forints, while changes to Hungary's energy transmission system would cost thousands of billions of forints, the prime minister said.Continue reading
Hungary will not support the European Commission’s sanctions against Russia as “problematic for the country” and “not offering a solution”, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in parliament on Monday.
“Hungarians must not be made to pay the price of the war,” he said. The Hungarian government makes a “clear distinction between attacker and victim”, it condemns Russia’s military aggression and supports Ukraine’s sovereignty, he said. Hungary launched “the greatest aid programme of all times” to help Ukraine and has so far accommodated nearly 700,000 refugees, he said.
The Hungarian government’s position has been clear since the outbreak of the war, Szijjártó said. It wants peace in Ukraine as soon as possible and will support all diplomatic efforts to that end, he added. He also noted that the government had voted for the first five sanction packages, but added that compromising Hungary’s energy supplies would be a “red line”. European leaders earlier agreed that they would only support measures that “take into consideration the different energy supply structure of each member”, Szijjártó said, and insisted that the current proposal would violate that consensus.
The current proposal “equals a nuclear bomb”, he insisted, which would compromise the security of Hungary’s energy supplies and, if passed, it would make it impossible for Hungary to purchase the oil crucial for its economy. Passing the new sanctions would raise the price of petrol in Hungary to 700 forints per litre and that of diesel to 800 forints, Szijjártó said.
Featured photo by Tibor Illyés/MTI