EU ministers urge Hungary to sign up to planned Russian oil embargo

[May 16, 2022] By Robin Emmott and Sabine Siebold

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU foreign ministers sought to publicly pressure Hungary on Monday to lift its veto on a proposed oil embargo on Russia, with Lithuania saying the bloc was being "held hostage by one member state".

The embargo proposed by the European Commission in early May would be the harshest sanction yet after Moscow's Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine and includes carve-outs for EU states most dependent on Russian oil.

Germany, the European Union's biggest economy and a major buyer of Russian energy, said it wanted a deal to authorise the oil embargo which it suggested could last for years.

"I am confident that we will find agreement in the coming days," German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said as she arrived for a meeting with her counterparts. "We need to prepare it extremely well because it needs to be sustainable."

But Hungary, Moscow's closest ally in the EU, has said it wants hundreds of millions of euros from the bloc to mitigate the cost of ditching Russian crude. The EU needs all 27 states to agree to the embargo for it to go ahead.
 

"The whole union is being held hostage by one member state ... we have to agree, we cannot be held hostage," Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said.

Few ministers directly called Hungary out by name as they spoke to reporters, but Romania said it was up to the bloc to bring Budapest round.

'OIL WILL BE INCLUDED'

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on his Facebook page on May 11 that there was no solution in sight.

He said the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban needed "hundreds of millions of dollars" for Hungarian refineries, a capacity increase for a Croatian pipeline and compensation for the Hungarian economy.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis listens during a news conference in Vilnius, Lithuania March 18, 2022. REUTERS/Janis Laizans/File Photo

However, EU ministers ranging from Austria to Estonia said there would still be an oil embargo, even if it took longer to come to an agreement.

"This package (of sanctions) will be adopted and oil will be included," Estonia's top diplomat, Eva-Maria Liimets, said - a position echoed by others, including Luxembourg and Romania. Spain also supported the Commission's proposal.

An oil embargo, already imposed by the United States and Britain and which would follow five rounds of earlier EU sanctions, is seen as the best way to reduce Russian income for its war in Ukraine.

The EU's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, last week signalled that Monday's meeting might have been the moment for a breakthrough. On Monday he said he was doing his utmost to unblock the situation.

Some diplomats now point to a May 30-31 summit as the moment for agreement on a phased ban on Russian oil, probably over six months, with a longer transition period for Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Moscow calls its invasion of Ukraine a "special military operation" to rid the country of fascists, an assertion Kyiv and its Western allies say is a baseless pretext for an unprovoked war.

(Reporting by Robin Emmott and Marine Strauss; Editing by Nick Macfie and Andrew Heavens)

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