Hungary and Ukraine traded insults Thursday in an escalating row over repeated oil supply disruptions, with Budapest banning a Ukrainian military commander for carrying out ‘extremely severe attacks’ on an oil pipeline in Russia.
Ukraine retorted by accusing Hungary of ‘moral decay’.
Hungary has repeatedly seen its oil supplies via the Druzhba pipeline disrupted as Kyiv targets Russian energy infrastructure since Moscow launched its invasion three years ago.
Relations between Kyiv and Budapest have plummeted since then, with Hungary’s nationalist leader Viktor Orban maintaining ties with the Kremlin and blocking Kyiv’s efforts to join the European Union.
Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said his country was issuing an entry ban against the Ukrainian ‘commander of the military unit that carried out the recent extremely severe attacks against the Druzhba oil pipeline’.
‘This was an attack on Hungary’s sovereignty, endangering our energy security,’ Szijjarto posted on X.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced Hungary’s move, saying on X that the entry ban ‘can only cause outrage’.
The announcement came after a massive Russian attack on Ukraine overnight killed at least 17 people, including four children, in one of the deadliest on Kyiv.
In response to Szijjarto’s post, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Hungary was ‘on the wrong side of history’.
‘How shameless to post this after a brutal attack by terrorist state Russia,’ Sybiha said on X.
‘Peter, if the Russian pipeline is more important to you than the Ukrainian children killed by Russia this morning, this is moral decay,’ he posted, adding that Kyiv would ‘take mirror action’.
Robert Brovdi, an ethnic Hungarian commander of Ukraine’s military forces who is facing the ban, dismissed Budapest’s ‘sanctions and restrictions’, adding on Telegram that ‘your hands are covered in Ukrainian blood. And we will remember that’.
Last week, Orban said he had complained to US President Donald Trump after Ukraine’s military operations against Russia disrupted oil supplies.
Hungary as well as Slovakia have also asked the European Commission to ‘act against Ukraine’s repeated attacks on the Druzhba oil pipeline’.
The EU imposed a ban on most oil imports from Russia in 2022, but the Druzhba pipeline was exempted to give landlocked Central European countries time to find alternative oil supplies.
Orban and his Slovakian counterpart Robert Fico have denounced the sanctions as threatening their countries’ energy security.
