Hungary intends to block further EU financial assistance to Ukraine because of the “increasingly hostile” attitude of Kiev, as the country’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó put it, Bloomberg reported. According to him, Budapest has already blocked the allocation of the eighth tranche of aid worth €500m. Furthermore, Szijjártó stressed that Hungary “will find it difficult to negotiate” a new package of sanctions against Russia until Ukraine removes the Hungarian OTP bank from the list of “international war sponsors”.
Hungary intends to block further European Union financial aid to Ukraine because of, as the country’s foreign minister put it, Kiev’s “increasingly hostile” attitude towards its neighbour, Bloomberg wrote.
Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjártó, said on Wednesday that Hungary had blocked the eighth tranche of €500 million in arms aid to Kiev from the European Peace Fund. He also stressed that Hungary “will find it difficult to negotiate” on the eleventh package of sanctions against Russia.
“It would be fair to say that we have had enough,” he said. Szijjártó listed three reasons behind Hungary’s decision.
The Hungarian foreign minister expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) of Ukraine has listed the Hungarian banking group OTP Bank Group as an international “war sponsor” because it continues to operate in Russia.
Furthermore, Szijjártó repeated the thesis that Ukraine restricts the education rights of ethnic Hungarians in the Transcarpathian region. Finally, he pointed to an article by the US newspaper The Washington Post, which claimed that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenski had previously wanted to blow up the Druzhba pipeline, which transports Russian oil to Hungary.
“I want to make it clear that as long as OTP is on the list of international sponsors of war, we cannot support decisions that require new economic and financial sacrifices by the European Union and its member states,” Szijjártó stressed. – The same applies to sanctions.
Hungary has opposed Russian energy sanctions since the start of the conflict in Ukraine and has refused to supply weapons to Kiev. Earlier, the country’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban called on the EU to consider cutting funding for Kiev, which, according to critics, is “akin to a call to capitulate to Moscow”, Bloomberg reported.
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