Kovács to BBC: EU decision on oil embargo a win for common sense
The decision made by European leaders on the EU embargo of Russian oil is a victory for common sense, Zoltán Kovács, the state secretary for international communication and relations, told BBC Radio 4 late on Tuesday.
Hungary is not blocking further sanctions against Russia, but any that are imposed will have to be based on common sense and the recognition that there are limits to what can be done when it comes to sanctions on energy, Kovács said. This doesn’t just apply to Hungary, but several other European Union member states as well, he added.
Landlocked EU countries like Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic depend heavily on Russian energy supply and are simply not in a position to impose immediate sanctions,
Kovács said.
He said the “golden rule” was that Europe should not impose sanctions that hurt it more than they would hurt Russia.
No one can ask Hungary to approve sanctions that would ruin its economy and Hungarian households, the state secretary said.
Put to him that Russian oil deliveries would not have been cut off overnight and that countries would have been given time to secure alternative energy supplies, Kovács said Hungary had made it clear that such a changeover could not even have been implemented over the next four to five years, let alone by the end of this year.
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Source: MTI
4 Comments
Turns out Hungary never had an energy security Plan B and we basically traded our values for cheap gas, oil and nuclear energy.
This is all the EU’s fault! They must fix it! Sounds like common sense, right?
The headline is seriously misleading. It implies that the BBC itself has suggested that the oil embargo decision is “a win for common sense”. The BBC has not made any such suggestion nor expressed any such view. The views expressed in the contents of a BBC radio interview or other forms of interview are those of the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the views of the BBC. I therefore respectfully ask you to rewrite the headline forthwith.
A country that has so much sun light but such little solar energy in terms of infrastructure when in a city like Budapest electricity could be free for much of the time? Ask Orbánski why sports stadiums (costing billions) are more important than energy security when it comes to spending EU money – The Hungarian government is like a drug addict. addicted to free money to fuel an addiction to more crack.
Dear Reader, thanks for bringing this to our attention. We’ve rewritten the title.