Minister: “historic peace” between Hungary and Serbia

Péter Szijjártó, the foreign minister, speaking at the cornerstone ceremony of Hungarian-owned UBM Group’s feed mixing plant in Adasevci, in Vojvodina, Serbia, said that when the government represented Hungary’s energy supply interests in Brussels, “we also represent Serbia’s interests”.

The minister said the facts on the ground of the region’s energy infrastructure and the natural gas sources available dictated that natural gas and oil from Russia “are dominant in our region”. “This is the reason why we can’t adopt measures that would place a disproportionate burden on Hungary,” he said.

Szijjártó said the past two years had been arduous for the region, with health difficulties, the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis to deal with, now compounded by war in the neighborhood.

“We’re confronting challenges that our generation had never faced and we thought we’d never face,”

he said.

Hungarians, he added, wanted peace, not war, and the Serbs could relate to that. Both peoples showed the world “how to make peace … and how to treat ethnic national communities as a resource rather than a source of conflict.”

Both countries and their economies “benefit greatly from this historic peace,” he said, adding that both enhanced the other’s security of energy supply.

Investments by Hungary’s largest companies helped Serbia to achieve record growth last year,