Viktor Orban has threatened to collapse the EU’s sanctions regime against Moscow this week if Ukraine does not allow the transit of Russian gas through pipelines in its territory.
The Hungarian prime minister said: “Now the issue of extending sanctions is on the agenda, I have put on the handbrake and asked European leaders to understand that this cannot continue.” The bloc’s sanctions are due to expire on January 31 and cannot be renewed if Hungary vetoes them.
Should they be lifted, some €200 billion of frozen Russian assets, used as collateral for a €48 billion loan to Ukraine, would immediately become available to President Putin. “If that happens, Russia wins the war, it’s as simple as that,” Peter Kreko, the director of the Political Capital Institute, a Hungarian think tank, said.
On January 1, Kyiv refused to renew a five-year deal that allowed Russian gas to flow into Hungary and Slovakia through the Druzhba pipelines. The deal nets the Kremlin around €5 billion each year. Orban and his Slovakian counterpart, Robert Fico, have claimed that severing the gas supply damages their economies and mean they had to pay more to import gas from elsewhere, but analysts argue otherwise.
“The narrative that Hungary gets Russian gas at a better price than other EU countries is entirely fake — we know from the central statistical office that expenditure on energy follows the price of gas for other countries,” Kreko said.
“Hungary is often buying gas when it is at market highs, so it’s hard to imagine the members of the Hungarian government do not have some personal economic interest in the flow of Russian gas.”
Critics argue that Hungary has had years to diversify its supply in the same way as other European countries and has simply chosen not to. Where Europe as a whole has reduced pipeline imports from 40 per cent in 2021 to 8 per cent in 2023, Hungary is increasing annual imports from Russia by more than 2 billion cubic metres. President Zelensky has offered Azerbaijani gas through Ukraine instead, but Orban has insisted on Russian produce.
President Zelensky has offered alternative gas transfers through the Druzhba pipelines
MARTIN DIVISEK/EPA
“For some reason Orban is really keen on Russian gas when there are other resources available from Norway and other countries,” Kreko said.
Hungarian investigative journalists suspect that the activities of MET Holding, an energy conglomerate founded by Benjamin Lakatos, a close ally of Orban, could provide clues to the prime minister’s preference for Russian gas.
A 2015 article by the news site 444.hu reported that MET had been purchasing discounted Russian gas and reselling it to the Hungarian state energy company at a higher rate, with its shareholders profiting at the expense of taxpayers. The article also alleged Orban’s direct involvement in the scheme.
At the time Csaba Lantos, who was then chairman of MET, denied Orban was involved with the company in any way. Lantos is now Orban’s minister for energy.
Today MET’s activities are hidden behind Swiss privacy laws. “The company is run from Switzerland, they pose as an international company and claim most of their activities are outside Hungary,” said Szabolcs Panyi, a journalist at Direkt36. “But because they are based in Switzerland we can’t find out what they’re really doing.”
Those who have been targets of Orban’s repressive domestic policies believe the EU must finally take decisive steps to bring Budapest into line with European values.
“The EU’s biggest mistake was to give member states the veto option,” said Balint Magyar, a research fellow at the Central European University, a George Soros-backed institution that Orban’s regime forced to relocate to Vienna in 2019. “They need to recognise that Hungary is not an illiberal democracy, it is an autocratic client state of Putin run by a criminal. Now the EU is in a life-or-death fight with Russia, Orban needs to be isolated and treated as a criminal.”
There are signs that Europe is starting to wake up to the dangers posed by pro-Kremlin leaders in Budapest and Bratislava. A trip to Moscow by Fico last week triggered mass protests against his leadership and prompted four Slovak MPs to withdraw their support — denying Fico a parliamentary majority and threatening to trigger snap elections.
On Saturday Poland, which holds the rotating EU Council presidency, warned Orban that there would be “consequences” if he continued to side with Putin.
“If Prime Minister Viktor Orbán really blocks European sanctions at a key moment for the war, it’ll be absolutely clear that in this big game for the security and future of Europe, he is playing in Putin’s team, not in ours,” the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk posted on X. “With all the consequences of this fact.”