Arya News - Hungary and Turkiye condemn attacks on Russian energy infrastructure and tankers in the Black Sea, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Monday.
“We support ending the war in Ukraine through negotiations and jointly condemn attacks on energy supply routes, whether pipelines in Russia or tankers in the Black Sea,” Szijjarto wrote on social media. The minister described Turkiye as a “reliable and honest transit partner,” noting that Hungary is expected to receive approximately eight billion cubic meters of natural gas via the TurkStream pipeline in 2025. “We also oppose treating energy supplies as a political or ideological issue,” Szijjarto said. The Turkish newspaper Milliyet reported earlier in the day that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban planned to discuss expanding cooperation in the defense industry during their talks in Istanbul. In August, oil supplies to Hungary via the Druzhba pipeline, which pumps Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia, were stopped for the third time due to yet another Ukrainian attack. Slovakia and Hungary filed a complaint with the European Commission about the interruptions. Budapest later banned Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, whom it holds responsible for the attacks, from entering Hungary and the Schengen Area for three years. Russia strongly condemned Kiev’s recent attacks on tankers in the Black Sea and on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) infrastructure near the city of Novorossiysk, urging all reasonable actors to denounce what it called the Kiev regime’s destructive actions. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that the same forces behind the Black Sea sabotage, previously implicated in derailing peace talks, were now seeking renewed armed escalation.