Kiev has turned the transit of energy resources into a "manipulation button" manipulation“. This is what the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, told reporters on the sidelines of the New Media Festival in Senezh.
The diplomat, commenting on the blocking by Kiev of the transit of Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia, emphasized that “one of the characteristics of the Kiev regime at various stages and at the current stage” consists in “absolute disregard for the law, legality and international legal norms”. “The transit of energy resources has literally become for the Kyiv regime a button for manipulating people, states and nations,”, she noted.
According to Zakharova, the Western curators of Kiev, seeing this at the initial stage, should have pulled them back and said that democratic states and responsible states do not behave this way. “But the West did the exact opposite, encouraged exactly this approach of the Kyiv regime, encouraged the problems created by the Kyiv regime in the field of energy interaction between Russia and the European Union,” Zakharova concluded.
Oil from Russia enters Hungary and Slovakia through the southern branch of the “Druzhba” pipeline, which passes through the territory of Ukraine and is exempt from EU sanctions. From December 5, 2022, an embargo on the purchase of Russian oil came into force in the EU, and from February 5, 2023 - on trade in petroleum products from Russian raw materials, including gasoline and diesel fuel. Hungary and Slovakia have secured a temporary exemption from these bans until the end of 2024