An adviser to the Ukrainian presidential administration, Mihailo Podoliak, backed off to the comments regarding the stoppage of Russian oil transit to Europe through the Drujba oil pipeline, which mainly supplies Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic, AFP informs.
President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the end of the transit of Russian gas through Ukrainian territory to Europe from January 1, 2025, according to Agerpres.
Later on last week, Podoliak assured that, “in addition to gas, the Drujba oil pipeline will stop working” also on that date, in an interview given to the Ukrainian publication Novini.Live.
Asked by AFP on Friday to clarify his remarks, Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s advisor backed down.
“We have fulfilled and will continue to fulfill all our contractual obligations to our European partners,” Podoliak told AFP, saying he wanted to make “a clarification” and praising Kiev’s “steady” position.
“This refers to our bilateral relations with European countries, including our Hungarian and Slovak partners,” he emphasized.
The Drujba pipeline – whose name means “Friendship” – was built in the early 1960s, during the Soviet period, and is now a network of almost 9,000 kilometers long.
Its northern branch connects Russia to Poland and Germany via Belarus, while the southern branch carries Russian oil to Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
The EU banned most oil imports from Russia from 2022, but the Drujba pipeline was initially exempted from this decision, after which Brussels banned the supply of crude to Germany and Poland through this infrastructure in the spring of 2023.
However, relations between Kiev, on the one hand, and Budapest and Bratislava, on the other, have become strained again since the two Central European countries accused the Ukrainian authorities in late July of obstructing the transit of oil from the Russian giant Lukoil intended for them, the company now being targeted by new sanctions by Kiev.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which is close to Vladimir Putin, and Slovakia, which is heavily dependent on Russian oil, have appealed to Brussels to resolve the dispute, but the European Commission said it did not consider their request for “urgent consultations” to be ” justified”.