The foreign minister said Europe “must face the fact” that the sanctions implemented against Russia in response to its attack on Ukraine have failed.
“The European economy is suffering and it seems clear who is profiting,” Péter Szijjártó told a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Central European Initiative in Sofia on Monday. The government will not let Hungarians be made to pay the price of war, and sees peace as the only solution, the minister said. Meanwhile, Hungary is under double pressure from migration, a significant security risk facing the country, he said. Hungary has so far accepted some 1 million Ukrainian refugees, and some 1,300 schools and kindergartens have taken on Ukrainian children. At the same time, “we can say without exaggeration that our southern border is under siege,” Szijjártó said. So far, authorities have thwarted some 230,000 illegal entry attempts there this year alone, he said. The numbers are now “similar to those during the migration crisis of 2015, and some arrivals are attacking each other and the border guards with weapons,” he said. Meanwhile, Brussels its keeping up its “hypocritical approach, encouraging migrants to set out for Europe and thereby keeping up the people smugglers’ business model, which is unacceptable,” Szijjártó said.