By Krisztina Than and Julia Payne<\/p>\n
BUDAPEST\/BRUSSELS, April 22 (Reuters) – Russian oil flowed through the Ukrainian section of the Druzhba pipeline on Wednesday after a halt lasting months, officials said, allowing \u200cHungary to lift its veto on a 90 billion euro ($105.79 billion) EU loan urgently needed \u200cby Kyiv.<\/p>\n
The Druzhba pipeline has become one of the most politically charged pieces of infrastructure in Europe since a Russian drone strike \u200bdamaged the pipeline in western Ukraine and stopped Russian oil deliveries to Hungary and Slovakia.<\/p>\n
Hungarian oil group MOL said on Wednesday that Ukraine had informed it that deliveries of Russian crude had resumed through the pipeline.<\/p>\n
“MOL expects the first crude oil shipments following the restart of the Ukrainian section of the pipeline system to arrive \u200cin Hungary and Slovakia by tomorrow \u2060at the latest,” it said in a statement.<\/p>\n
EU LOAN<\/p>\n
Pumping began at 0935 GMT, an industry source said, asking not to be named because they were not authorised to \u2060speak publicly.<\/p>\n
Shortly afterwards, EU ambassadors meeting in Brussels approved the loan. The European Union’s 27 member states are now expected to formally sign off on it by Thursday afternoon.<\/p>\n
The EU agreed to the loan last year to maintain \u200bUkraine’s \u200bliquidity through 2026 and 2027 but Hungary’s Prime Minister \u200bViktor Orban and the Slovak government had blocked \u200cit, accusing Ukraine of delaying the pipeline repairs, which Kyiv denied.<\/p>\n
Both Hungary and Slovakia are heavily dependent on Russian oil and Orban has consistently shown support for Russia.<\/p>\n
DRUZHBA PIPELINE<\/p>\n
Ukraine’s prospects of receiving the loan had already improved when Orban lost Hungary’s parliamentary election on April 12. The leader of the winning party, Peter Magyar, has said he will no longer block the EU funds for Kyiv, though he is only \u200cexpected to take power next month.<\/p>\n
The capacity of Druzhba, which \u200bin Russian means friendship, is 1.2 million to 1.4 million barrels \u200bof oil a day, with the possibility \u200bto increase to up to 2 million barrels a day. However, flows fell to \u200ca small fraction of that as a result \u200bof Western sanctions as \u200bwell as repeated disruptions from drone attacks.<\/p>\n
Separately, Germany confirmed that no Kazakh crude would reach its PCK Schwedt refinery – one of the country’s largest – from May, after industry sources said on Tuesday \u200bthat Russia was set to stop \u200cKazakhstan’s oil exports via the Druzhba pipeline.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8511 euros)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Anna Pruchnicka, Krisztina \u200bThan, Jan Lopatka, Julia Payne, Bart Meijer, Lili Bayer; Writing by Jan Strupczewski and Ingrid \u200bMelander;Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Barbara Lewis, Kirsten Donovan)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Krisztina Than and Julia Payne BUDAPEST\/BRUSSELS, April 22 (Reuters) – Russian oil flowed through the Ukrainian section…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2466,4,58,1966,1401,14626,64,14554],"class_list":{"0":"post-20199","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-europe","8":"tag-druzhba-pipeline","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-hungary","11":"tag-kyiv","12":"tag-russian-oil","13":"tag-ukrainian-section","14":"tag-viktor-orban","15":"tag-western-ukraine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}