The head of the Foreign Ministry of Hungary Peter Szijarto stated that his country will block the next tranches of EU aid for Ukraine in the amount of €500 million and will not support sanctions against Russia.
Bloomberg writes about it.
Hungary demands that Ukraine remove OTP Bank from the list of war sponsors.
He also noted that Ukraine restricts the education rights of ethnic Hungarians. Finally, he talked about the Washington Post article, which allegedly says that the President Volodymyr Zelensky once talked about blowing up the Druzhba oil pipeline, which supplies oil from Russia to Hungary through Ukraine.
"I want to make it clear that as long as Ukraine keeps the OTP on its list of international war sponsors, we cannot support decisions that require new economic and financial sacrifices from the European Union and its member states. The same applies to sanctions," Sijarto noted.
- Earlier, the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) of Ukraine announced that it had included OTP Bank, the largest Hungarian bank, on the list of war sponsors because of the position of the bankʼs management to continue operating in the Russian Federation. NAPC maintains a list of sponsors of the war, but it has no status and does not lead to any legal consequences.
- After that, Hungary blocked the allocation of another €500 million tranche from the European Peace Fund. It finances to member states the cost of military equipment that they transfer to Ukraine.