Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said the operation of the TurkStream pipeline is guaranteed in the long run after Dutch authorities re-issued the export license of a company partly responsible for its maintenance.
Minister Szijjártó said withdrawing the export licence of the company, which is registered in the Netherlands, could have “brought a worrying situation” for the long-term operation of the pipeline linking Hungary with Russia. He said he had addressed the issue with the Dutch energy minister several times and was informed on Wednesday that the licence has been again green-lighted. “The operation of the TurkStream pipeline is again fully reliable in the long run,” he said. Szijjártó called the European Commission’s new proposal to curb the fallout of the energy crisis in Europe “inadequate, even dangerous”, and said that Russia would stop delivering natural gas to the continent if the measure were adopted. “Europe needs as much natural gas as possible, arriving to the continent from as many resources and routes as possible”, and the proposal would result in the opposite, he said. Meanwhile, Hungary’s gas supplies through the southern pipeline are uninterrupted, he said. The country’s gas reserves are at 50% of its annual demand, comfortably higher than the EU’s 27% average, he said.