Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, will face pressure from other EU leaders to stop blocking a vital €90bn loan for Ukraine over a political dispute about an oil pipeline. Ahead of an EU summit on Thursday, Orbán, who faces elections next month, showed no sign of backing down in his veto of the loan.
He said he would not allow it until the damaged Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline supplying Hungary with Russian oil via Ukraine was repaired. “If there is no oil, there is no money,” Orbán said in a video message on Tuesday posted after the publication of a letter from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, saying “all possible efforts” to repair the Druzbha pipeline were under way.
Orbán said he had made it clear to the European Council president, António Costa, that Hungary’s position was unchanged. “If President Zelenskyy wants to receive his money from Brussels then he must reopen the Friendship [Druzhba] oil pipeline,” he said.
Zelenskyy said on Wednesday he hoped EU leaders would stand by their promise to lend Ukraine €90bn for urgently needed military supplies and general budget support. “We are really counting on the countries and the EU to find ways to resolve this issue,” he said on a visit to Madrid.
Zelenskyy told EU leaders earlier this week that Ukraine was “undertaking all possible efforts to repair the damage and restore operations” to the pipeline, which Kyiv says was damaged by a Russian airstrike. Hungary and Slovakia are the only two EU countries that benefit from Druzbha, having secured a temporary exemption from the EU’s import ban on Russian oil, which was introduced after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.