Hungary said negotiating is the better option rather than adding more sanctions against Russia.
Brussels:
The European Union must stop adding sanctions to Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and instead push for a ceasefire and start negotiations, a senior aide to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Thursday.
Speaking on the sidelines of a summit of EU leaders that granted Ukraine candidate status to join the EU, the aide said the more sanctions the EU imposed, the more they harm the bloc, while Russia survived.
“Ultimately, Europe will be on the losing side of this war because of the economic problems. Our recommendation would be that we stop the sanctions process,” Balazs Orban, who is not related to the prime minister, told Reuters in an interview.
Hungary is one of the most pro-Russian EU countries, heavily dependent on Russian gas and oil. Russia is also building a nuclear reactor for Hungary. Budapest had held up the latest sanctions package against Moscow, which included a ban on Russian oil imports, until it negotiated an exemption for itself.
“Right now we experience that the more sanctions we accept, the worse we are. And the Russians? Yes, it hurts them too, but they survive. And what’s worse, they continue in Ukraine,” Balazs said. said Orban.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the 27-nation European Union has agreed on six sanctions packages, including asset freezes and visa bans on Russian oligarchs and officials, export controls, freeze on central bank assets, unlink banks from SWIFT messaging system and a ban on the import of Russian coal and oil.
But some officials argue individual oligarchs can live without some of their yachts or Western villas, have likely already moved cash outside the EU, and export controls could be evaded by China and others.
The freeze on Russia’s central bank reserves is made less painful by the billions of dollars Russia gets every day for its oil and gas still flowing to Europe, they say. If the EU stops buying Russian oil next year, the crude could be sold and shipped by tankers to China or India, some officials say.
Others argue that the sanctions are working, but it will take time for their full impact on the Russian economy to show.
However, Orban said the EU needs to change its tactics.
“We’ve reached a point where we realize we’ve been following the strategy for four months, we’ve had some achievements, but if it continues like this, I think it’s going to end in a bad way for Europe. So we have to think about something Negotiations, ceasefire, peace. Diplomacy. That’s our solution,” Orban said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
