Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n on Sunday appeared to suggest Ukraine was involved in planning an act of sabotage after Serbia reported finding explosives on a gas pipeline used to transport Russian natural gas to the two countries.<\/p>\n
Earlier on Sunday, Serbian President Aleksandar Vu\u010di\u0107 said explosives “of devastating force” were found on the Balkan Stream pipeline near the village of Velebit on the Hungarian border.<\/p>\n
The pipeline transports Russian natural gas from Turkey via Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary.<\/p>\n
Vu\u010di\u0107 and Orb\u00e1n – who are both friendly towards Russia and maintain good bilateral relations – discussed the matter by phone and said investigations were ongoing. Orb\u00e1n said Hungary’s defence council would hold an emergency session to discuss the matter.<\/p>\n
Orb\u00e1n under pressure<\/p>\n
Hungary is due to hold a parliamentary election in a week, on April 12, and polls suggest Orb\u00e1n’s Fidesz party could lose out to the conservative opposition Respect and Freedom Party (Tisza).<\/p>\n
For months, Orb\u00e1n has been campaigning for votes primarily by criticizing Ukraine and the EU aid provided to the country amid Russia’s ongoing invasion.<\/p>\n
He did not explicitly state that he suspects Kiev of being behind the pipeline incident, but repeated familiar accusations against Ukraine after the defence council meeting.<\/p>\n
His foreign minister, P\u00e9ter Szijj\u00e1rt\u00f3, said the discovery of explosives at the pipeline in Serbia fits in with the other actions Orb\u00e1n has blamed on Ukraine.<\/p>\n
“Ukraine has been working for years to cut Europe off from [Russian] gas supplies,” Orb\u00e1n said in a video on Facebook.<\/p>\n
The Ukrainians had already destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline and were blocking oil supplies from Russia to Hungary via the Druzhba pipeline running through Ukraine, he said.<\/p>\n
The Ukrainian military is constantly attacking the section of the TurkStream gas pipeline located on Russian territory, to which Balkan Stream is connected, he continued.<\/p>\n
Orb\u00e1n has long accused Kiev of preventing the resumption of operations on the Druzhba pipeline for political reasons.<\/p>\n
Ukraine rejects the allegations and stresses that the pipeline is currently unusable due to Russian airstrikes.<\/p>\n
No one has yet been held to account for the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines from Russia to Germany; the suspected Ukrainian mastermind is currently in pre-trial detention in Germany.<\/p>\n
Orb\u00e1n said Hungary would step up its military surveillance of the section of the Balkan Stream pipeline located on Hungarian territory, adding that the “vital” pipeline supplies 60% of the country’s natural gas requirements.<\/p>\n
Opposition suspects election campaign ploy<\/p>\n
The leader of Hungary’s opposition and top candidate of the Tisza party, P\u00e9ter Magyar, accused Orb\u00e1n of seeking to sow panic during the election campaign.<\/p>\n
Magyar wrote on Facebook that he had been receiving signals for weeks that “false flag” operations of this nature were being planned.<\/p>\n
There had been repeated reports that something would “coincidentally” happen to the pipeline a week before the election, around Easter, he said.<\/p>\n
“I also call on Viktor Orb\u00e1n to stop (at least during the holidays) the scaremongering and the sowing of confusion planned by Russian advisers,” Magyar continued.<\/p>\n
Should Orb\u00e1n use the incident for election campaign propaganda, this would amount to an admission that it was a “false flag” operation, he said.<\/p>\n
The director of Serbia’s military intelligence service, \u0110uro Jovani\u0107, refuted allegations that the Serbian military could be involved in a “false flag” operation designed to accuse Ukraine of sabotage.<\/p>\n
He said there were indications that the explosives were manufactured in the United States, adding that the authorities are searching for a militarily trained “member of a migrant group,” who they suspect of planning the attack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n on Sunday appeared to suggest Ukraine was involved in planning an act of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[10161,8264,3207,10160,9861,937,422,10159,934,10157,9933,10158,330,350],"class_list":{"0":"post-11624","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-viktor-orban","8":"tag-balkan-stream","9":"tag-druzhba-pipeline","10":"tag-election-campaign","11":"tag-explosives","12":"tag-gas-pipeline","13":"tag-hungarian-prime-minister","14":"tag-hungary","15":"tag-nord-stream","16":"tag-peter-magyar","17":"tag-russian-natural-gas","18":"tag-serbia","19":"tag-serbian-president-aleksandar-vucic","20":"tag-ukraine","21":"tag-viktor-orban"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116354659359204218","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}