The measure will allow Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to continue to be supplied and will deprive the Europeans, by the end of the year, of two thirds of the oil they buy in Russia.
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This is a contradictory injunction to which the twenty-seven try to respond. On the one hand, they want to display their unit against Moscow and their determination to no longer finance, by their Russian energy purchases, the Vladimir Putin war in Ukraine. On the other hand, if they have already agreed to decide a Russian coal embargo from August, they must take note of the fact that Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic say they are, to This stage, not ready to do without Russian oil, and therefore to confirm the sixth pack of sanctions by Europeans against Moscow. The three countries, very landlocked, indeed argue that they do not have immediate alternatives.
It was therefore to a delicate exercise that the heads of European state and government, who met in Brussels on Monday, May 30, engaged. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban warned upon his arrival in the Belgian capital. On Twitter, he set the tone: “Brussels, the battle begins,” he wrote. A little later, he accused the commission of having mentioned an oil embargo without the prior support of all the member states, qualifying his behavior as “irresponsible” and warning that there was “no acceptable compromise” for the moment ” . Hungary requires “guarantees” for supply, he added. And probably also time and hundreds of millions of euros to adapt the country’s oil infrastructure to the new reality.
The Hungarian counterparts wanted to calm the game and none of them attacked him directly. Even Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish head of government, one of the firmer opponents of Moscow and the most critical of Budapest, spared him. “We understand” Hungarian, Czech and Slovak situations, he said. Before adding: “We have specific solutions for them.”
As for the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who addressed videoconference for fifteen minutes to the twenty-seven, he did not provoke his interlocutors, while during the council of March 24, he had distributed the good and The bad points and stretched Viktor Orban. However, he pressed the leaders of the European Union (EU) to agree, notably stressing that, during the 52 days which followed the adoption of the fifth package of sanctions, on April 8, 74 children are 3267969Morms. “I do not blame any of you,” he added, before calling his interlocutors to agree on the sixth pack of sanctions.
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