Brussels – While all EU countries have reduced (with varying outcomes) their dependence on Russian gas over the past two and a half years, one goes against the trend: Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Which, instead of giving up fossil energy from Moscow, raises and doubles down. Budapest is in talks with Gazprom, the Federation’s energy giant, to increase gas supplies in 2025, and it threatens to block the European sanctions regime if Brussels has any objections.
“We will increase the volumes” of gas imported from Russia, declared the Magyar foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, in an interview published Tuesday (Oct. 15) by the Ria Novosti news agency, close enough to the Kremlin to have been sanctioned by the EU and affected by the twelve-star decision not to be allowed to operate in the single market. The willingness of the Hungarian minister sounds like a provocation to the club of 27, of which Budapest is a member.
“We have already signed” an agreement “for the last quarter of this year, which covers additional volumes” of gas at a competitive price, Szijjártó added, also announcing that an “agreement for next year” is being negotiated with the company. The state-owned company Gazprom and its Hungarian counterpart, Mol, signed a memorandum of understanding for increased supplies last October 10.
The TurkStream pipeline, an infrastructure strongly desired by Ankara (and completed shortly before the invasion of Ukraine), makes increasing the volumes of methane pumped from Russia possible. The pipeline connects the Federation to the Old Continent through the Black Sea. Once it arrives in Bulgaria, the pipeline takes the name Balkan Stream: Sofia does not source from it but ensures the passage of methane to Serbia and, indeed, Hungary.
Budapest imports approximately 4.5 billion cubic meters of gas from Moscow each year, per a 15-year agreement signed in 2021. Between gas and oil, as Szijjártó himself recently admitted, Hungary covers almost 80 per cent of its energy needs with Russian hydrocarbons. The central European country has obtained a waiver from Brussels to continue using the Druzhba pipeline, which in English is called “Friendship” (in homage to the purported friendly relationship between the USSR republics) and is the longest in the world. Should that waiver be challenged, Szijjártó said, Budapest will use its veto power to block EU sanctions against Russia, which are currently being renewed unanimously by the Twenty-Seven every six months.
In the meantime, Kyiv announced that it would not renew the agreement that allows Russian gas to transit to Europe through its territory (along the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline, also built in Soviet times, which supplies Austria, Slovakia and Hungary) once it expires next December.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
