Hungary misses Russian gas, turns to the Southern Caucasus

Hungary has a vested interest in importing green electricity form the Southern Caucasus, and a transmission line linking Georgia and Romania under the Black Sea is key for that transaction, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in Tbilisi on Thursday.

Speaking at a meeting on the Green Energy Corridor, Szijjártó said the current geopolitical crisis had laid bare the vulnerability of European supply lines. The price of natural gas had risen to ten times its pre-crisis price at one point, and European states have struggled to fill their reserves, he added. Szijjártó called the sabotage on the NordStream pipeline a “terrorist attack on critical European infrastructure” and called for an independent international investigation on the matter, MTI wrote.

Had winter not been so mild, Europe would have faced much more serious problems, he added. Regarding mid- and long-term challenges, Szijjártó said that besides the “tens of billions of cubic meters of Russian gas” missing from European supplies, the reopening of the Chinese economy is expected to hike up demand. While Hungary sees the protection of the environment as key, the government handles the issue rationally rather than as a “dogmatic or ideological issue”, and so tries to diversify its energy supply with environmentally friendly resources, he said.