State Secretary Tamás Menczer said the first missile attack on Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region on Tuesday afternoon was probably targeted at a railway station. The foreign ministry is in constant contact with the Hungarian representation in Uzhorod (Ungvár).
Menczer told Kossuth Rádió that the attack started at 6pm on Tuesday and lasted two hours, he said. No casualties were reported, he said. “It is important to note that the attack justifies our decision not to transport weapons to the war,” as the deliveries could easily become a target of Russian attacks, he said. Regarding the European Union’s latest sanctions against Russia, Menczer said Hungary “cannot support” sanctions that hit the energy sector. Some 85 percent of gas and 65 percent of oil consumed in Hungary comes from Russia, and replacement is impossible from “one day to the other”, he said. At the same time, the government agrees with diversifying European energy deliveries, “although we can only buy gas and oil from [countries] that have it,” he said. Speaking on public current affairs channel M1, Menczer said the Adria pipeline would require serious upgrades by Croatia if Hungary were to receive crude oil via that route. It would also require the alteration of Hungarian refineries to process crude other than the Russian product, and such a conversion would take years, he said.
Photo credit: Facebook/Menczer Tamás