Hungary helps Putin’s ministers in the EU?

Hungary would like three Russian ministers to be exempted from the new EU sanctions, EUobserver wrote on Friday based on information from unnamed diplomats. According to the online news outlet, Hungary insisted Nikolay Grigoryevich Shulginov, the Russian minister for energy, sports minister Oleg Maticin, and Mikhail Murasko, the Russian Minister of Health, be taken out from the latest EU sanction package.

Hungary helps the Russians?

Before, the EU ambassadors of the 27 Member States agreed to introduce the ninth round of anti-Russia sanctions. They wrote down the new measures on Friday without any further debate.

The Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, told the press after the summit that the new sanctions will consider almost 200 Russian individuals. European media reported in June that the EU did not introduce sanctions against Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’, and the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Vetoing the possible sanctions against the three Russian ministers fits into that pattern, index.hu suggests. The Hungarian threat of a possible veto came last minute. One EU diplomat dubbed it a “political corruption” sending the message to Putin that Hungary is ready to save anybody put on the blacklist. EUobserver recalled that Hungary was not the only member country following individual interests. For example, Belgium managed to “talk the EU out of a Russia-diamond ban that would have cost thousands of jobs in its Antwerp diamond-trading centre.”

Furthermore, EUobserver writes that “Russia’s fertiliser and chemicals barons will partly get off the hook on EU sanctions after a last-minute deal in Brussels on Thursday”

• Read also: Vetoing the sanctions against Patriarch Kirill: Orbán responds to Luxemburg’s PM criticism

Putin does not seem to be worried

Russian President Vladimir Putin is not worried because of the ninth sanctions package. Index.hu writes that his official communication does not suggest excitement. Putin argued that Russia tackles the harmful effects of the EU sanctions by selling gas to their Eastern neighbours. He probably meant China and India.

At a Thursday meeting, Russian officials told Putin that the nuclear power’s GDP is expected to decrease by 2.5 percent in 2022. Before, estimates went much higher and two-digit numbers circulated in the issue for a long time.

“The Western countries try to push Russia to the periphery. But we will never choose the way of self-isolation. On the contrary, we will expand cooperation and economic ties with everybody interested”, the lord of the Kremlin stated.

Read alsoRussian spy tried to smuggle information to Budapest in his rectum

Source: Euobserver, index.hu