Hungary and Serbia consider ensuring the security of the TurkStream gas pipeline a task, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said during talks with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in Belgrade.
The Hungarian Prime Minister emphasized that on January 1, 2025, Ukraine stopped transporting Russian gas to Central and Eastern Europe. Therefore, TurkStream is the only gas pipeline supplying Russian gas to this region.
"Our task today is to protect the pipeline running through Serbia to Hungary," he said on Hungarian television.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said earlier that the attack on the TurkStream pipeline could be considered an infringement of the sovereignty of European countries using the pipeline.
The European Commission also expressed concern after reports of a Ukrainian attack on a compressor station in Russia's Krasnodar region that feeds gas into the TurkStream pipeline.
On January 13, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that two days earlier, Ukraine had used nine drones to attack a gas compressor station in the Krasnodar region, southern Russia, in an attempt to disrupt gas supplies via the TurkStream pipeline. The gas compressor station continued to operate normally after the attack.
Hungary receives Russian gas under long-term contracts with Gazprom via the TurkStream gas pipeline as well as its branches running through Bulgaria and Serbia.
In 2022, Hungary received 4.8 billion cubic meters of gas via this pipeline. According to Hungarian data, the amount of gas increased to 5.6 billion cubic meters in 2023 and 7.6 billion cubic meters in 2024. Hungary's total gas imports are around 9 billion cubic meters per year.
