Foreign ministers in the EU Council agreed on another six-month renewal of the bloc’s extensive sanctions against Russia during a meeting on Monday, January 27th, in Brussels. After Hungary initially threatened a veto, its demands for a guarantee of member states’ energy security were approved, paving the way for the unanimous decision.
The EU has adopted fifteen rounds of sanctions against Russia since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The sanctions would have expired at the end of January unless the member states agreed to reinstate them.
This so-called ‘roll-over’ is usually just a formality, but Hungary’s sovereigntist government was prepared to veto it unless its concerns about Ukraine’s recent attack on vital energy infrastructure were addressed.
The strategy seems to have worked, as the Council—chaired by the Commission’s foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas—adopted the roll-over without much deliberation while Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó celebrated the win on social media by saying that Budapest received the “guarantees” it was seeking for its energy security.
“The European Commission is committed to protecting the natural gas and oil pipelines to EU Member States,” Szijjártó wrote. “They have made it clear that the integrity of the energy infrastructure supplying EU Member States is a matter of security for the EU as a whole.”
The minister added that the EU Commission also promised to seek further guarantees from Ukraine that it would maintain oil supplies to Europe in the future.
These guarantees were needed after Ukraine recently stopped transporting Russian natural gas through its territory to Slovakia—causing a diplomatic conflict that contributed to the destabilization of the country’s government—as well as attacked the TurkStream, a separate pipeline that was delivering gas to Hungary via Turkey, Bulgaria, and Serbia.
With three other gas pipelines, including Nord Stream I and II, disconnected or sabotaged, TurkStream is the last remaining operational pipeline network that carries Russian gas to Europe. It can supply a handful of Central European countries but Hungary is the only EU member state currently importing gas through it, as the others have already switched to much more expensive alternatives, such as American LNG.
But while the protection of operational pipelines is included in the deal, there is no word about Ukraine being asked to renew the gas transit through the Brotherhood pipeline running through its territory toward Slovakia.
The agreement, therefore, seems more like a compromise, given Budapest’s original demands. Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán said on Friday that the price for dropping the veto included resuming gas transit as well. “If the Ukrainians want help, such as [continuing to] sanction Russia, then they should reopen” the pipeline, he said.
What points to Orbán’s remarks being a conscious case of ‘Trumpian’ dealmaking—asking for more to get what you want—is that a day later, the Hungarian foreign ministry clarified that renewed gas transit through Ukraine wasn’t absolutely necessary after all. As Szijjártó explained on Saturday, Hungary was prepared to support the sanctions as long as the Commission “guarantees that it will act in all future cases when the energy security of EU member states is threatened from the outside.”
When asked to clarify after the meeting, Kallas described these guarantees as part of the EU Commission’s “energy solidarity toward landlocked countries,” such as Hungary and Slovakia, which cannot easily import sea-borne LNG as an alternative to pipeline gas. The commissioner also said Brussels will look into ways to support these countries with additional funds to finance their energy diversification, but dodged the question about whether the EU would ask Ukraine to renew its transit agreement with Gazprom.
