Serbia not giving up Russian oil, signs pipeline deal with Hungary

The Serbian government has announced that it intends to start construction of the 128-kilometer cross-border oil pipeline with Hungary, worth 150 million euros, by 2025.

After commissioning, the capacity will be around 5 million tons of oil per year, said Serbian Energy Minister Dubravka Djedovic Handanovic in a press release on Tuesday after the Balkan Forum in Budapest.

Serbia gets its oil from Croatia via the JANAF oil pipeline, but these supplies fell under EU sanctions after the bloc imposed restrictions on Russia in 2022 over its war against Ukraine.

The new pipeline will supply Serbia with Russian Urals oil via the Druzhba oil pipeline, which runs through Ukraine to Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Last year, Serbia and Hungary signed the contract for the cross-border pipeline that will run from the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad to Algyo in Hungary.

In November, local media quoted Djedovic-Handanovic as saying that the construction work would be carried out on Serbian territory by the state oil storage operator Transnafta.

Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary constantly reject the EU sanctions policy against Russia because both countries maintain good relations with Vladimir Putin.

On January 21, 2021, Hungary became the first country in the European Union to approve the Russian Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine. After the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Hungary was one of the EU countries to impose minor sanctions against Russia, while Russia put all EU countries on the list of “unfriendly nations”.

Unlike Hungary, Serbia has not imposed any sanctions against Russia, despite being a candidate country for the European Union./The Geopost/