Hungary is Angry About Alleged Ukrainian Plan to Blow Up Critical Pipeline
Jose Nino
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After the Washington Post published revelations from a leak that showed Ukrainian plans to blow up the Druzhba oil pipeline that transports crude oil from Russia to Hungary, Hungarian media outlets went apoplectic.
Per the leaked documents, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky put forward the idea during a February meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Yuliya Svyrydenko that Ukraine should blow up the pipeline in order to knock out part of Hungary’s energy infrastructure dependent on Russian oil.
Hungarian government spokesman Zoltán Kovács tweeted about the leak’s revelation: “How is it possible that Ukraine is plotting against a NATO country??”
Hungarian security analyst Péter Tarjányi declared in a Facebook post that the Ukrainian plan would be a “very unfriendly, mistaken and stupid move.”
He continued: “I understand that Ukraine does not like many Hungarian government actions and communications, but this does not justify such a plan or idea.”
Tarjányi then called attention to how “on the one hand, Hungary has helped hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees over the past 15 months, despite all the differences of opinion. We have to understand, our country sent aid, medicine AND!!! in the end voted for ALL sanctions against Russia.”
Furthermore, he highlighted that “in addition to this, and this is not a negligible FACT, Hungary is a NATO member, so such a plan makes no sense at all. This is a huge self-deception on the part of Ukraine, and Kyiv must explain itself very quickly. The main question is: Why did the Ukrainian president think that such a plan could be justified???? Why did he think he could risk NATO support by launching such an attack? I await further information on the matter.”
Although Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine sharply reduced Russian crude oil imports to the European Union, per Eurostat data, in 2022 Hungary imported 4.8 million tons of crude oil from Russia, which represented a figure that was 1.4 million higher than in 2021.
The leak was part of a series of military intelligence documents published on a Discord server by Jack Teixeira, an airman at a National Guard unit in Massachusetts. Hungary has stood out for its reasonable foreign policy in the face of a potential nuclear conflict between NATO and Russia. Instead of pursuing a fanatic regime change policy towards Russia, Hungary has called for restraint and tough diplomacy to settle this matter.
For once, can the Collective West look at Hungary as a beacon of rationality in a time of mass geopolitical chaos?
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