Szijjarto: Hungary’s energy supply uninterrupted

Hungary is receiving a daily 10 million cubic metres of natural gas from the south via the Turkey-Bulgaria-Serbia corridor, the minister said.

Szijjarto said he had told Cavusoglu that while Hungary’s interests lay in maintaining European unity, “we cannot allow Hungarians to pay the price of war”.

“We will avoid the imposition of sanctions on energy supply under all circumstances, and as I saw during my talks in Brussels on Friday, there are several of us in the European Union who hold this position,” Szijjarto said.

He stressed the protection of Hungary as the top priority during the war in Ukraine. To ensure that, he said, Hungary needed to be prevented from being dragged into the war. “To ensure this, we will resist pressure and the opposition’s demands: we will send neither troops nor weapons to Ukraine and we will not allow lethal aid to transit our territory,” he said.

Szijjarto said NATO foreign ministers agreed at a summit on Friday that the alliance must do everything possible to avoid direct conflict with Russia.

“We made it clear that NATO is not part of this war,” he said.

He added, at the same time, that the issue of energy security also needed to be considered.

“Fortunately, our Turkish friends share experiences similar to ours, as they’re not seeing any drops or interruptions in their energy supply, either,” the minister said.