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Government: fuel shortages “are not impossible”
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Responding to questions, the prime minister chief of staff, Gergely Gulyás, said an EU embargo on Russian gas would pose difficulties not only to the eastern and central Europen economies but also to the western European ones. “Such a decision would be contrary to common sense.”
Hungary’s government would be capable to maintain the cap on fuel prices as long as supplies are forthcoming, he said. Should the EU’s embargo go through, the “price caps would become untenable overnight”, he said. While supply chain security has been shaken, fuel shortages “are not impossible but unlikely,” he said. If necessary, Hungary’s strategic reserves can ward off shortages for up to a year, he said.
Hungary has done the most in the EU to diversify its energy supplies in the past 12 years,
with interconnectors with five neighbouring countries constructed during that period, Gulyás said. “We will wean the country from Russian oil when it will not bring us, Hungarian families and the economy extra costs,” he said.
Regarding the EU’s sanctions policy, Gulyás noted that
Russia’s revenues from raw material exports had already exceeded that in 2021.
In the long term, the aggression will curb Russian-European ties and prompt the country to turn towards Asia, forcing Europe to find alternative sources of raw materials, he said.
On Hungary’s veto to add the head of the Russian Orthodox church, Patriarch Kirill, to the sanctions list, Gulyás said that while “the Russian Orthodox church is usually supporting Russian state aims”, the patriarch is “the representative of a church — I would not call a church pro-war”.