Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said the decision in Kyiv to stop Lukoil shipments to Hungary and Slovakia was likely coordinated in Brussels as “they cannot stand it that Hungary has not backed down under pressure”.
Addressing a Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) event in Esztergom, the foreign minister said that the European Union had “weakened a lot”, but “it is surely not so weak as to tolerate a candidate country taking a decision without any consultation”, threatening the security of the energy supply of two EU member states. He noted Ukraine’s action affected a third of Hungarian crude oil imports and 40-45% of Slovak imports, “a significant energy supply risk”. Further, Croatia was abusing its position by “hiking transit fees several times over” and limiting Hungary to short-term contracts, he added. He said Brussels and Zagreb “should not dictate the route [of] our energy resources; we don’t tell others either”. “Even though solidarity is one of the most oft-used words in the European political discourse, Brussels now stands idly by as a membership candidate is trying to put two member states in a difficult situation and a third is trying to profit from that.” He said criticisms levelled at Hungary regarding its approach to Ukraine must be rejected now that it received 42% of its electricity from Hungary, and Hungary has accepted more than 1.3 million refugees and the children of refugee families are attending some 1,500 institutions, “despite the fact that Ukraine is riding roughshod over the rights of ethnic Hungarians”, Szijjártó said. Unless that situation changed, the payment of “a few billion euros within the European Peace Facility” would be out of the question, he said. The peace facility’s name is “tragic rather than funny”. Szijjártó said that Russia was advancing in the meantime, despite Western allies pouring weapons worth many billions of euros into Ukraine over the past two and a half years. “We, among the last in Europe who can talk to anyone, have the task to re-open diplomatic channels and restart dialogue,” he said. Meanwhile, the minister said the European Parliament had shifted to the right. At the same time, Szijjártó said the European People’s Party had carved up parliamentary positions in coalition with the Socialists and had included the liberals and greens in the process as its popularity waned. “That process ground down the EPP as a right-wing political entity, and it is now a mainstream left-leaning party group,” Szijjártó said. The vacuum on the right wing was filled by two party groups, he said. “But there will come a time when the EP’s third-largest party group — soon to be its second-largest — will be a truly right-wing grouping,” Szijjártó said. Regarding Hungarian-US relations, Szijjártó said he wanted relations to thrive, “but that obviously has a requirement on the other side of the pond, and that requirement is called Donald Trump.” Should Trump win the upcoming elections, US-Hungarian relations could peak again, he said. “If the Democrats continue, we can’t expect anything good, not only in terms of US-Hungary relations but on the matter of peace and war.” Szijjártó said that the greatest success of Hungarian foreign policy was that “outside the transatlantic bubble, Hungary is equated with rationality, common sense and mutual respect.”