The Zelenskiys are shooting domestically – this is how they can jump into Hungary’s place

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó posted about it on Tuesday on his social pagethat the development that led to the recent increase in natural gas prices was that Ukraine stopped transporting Russian natural gas through its territory to Central Europe. Since the suspension of the Ukrainian transit route became final in mid-December, the price of natural gas on the European market has increased by 20 percent.

Therefore, the foreign attorney had a telephone consultation with Slovak Foreign Minister Juraj Blanár, with whom they agreed that the association agreement between the EU and Ukraine should be respected by both parties, and this agreement also provides for the maintenance of energy transport routes.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine responded to this on his Facebook page wrote about how, according to the European Commission’s announcement, Ukraine’s previously announced decision to suspend gas transit did not have a negative impact on the EU’s energy security. Péter Szijjártó’s statement is therefore called part of a politically motivated information campaign aimed at domestic consumption.

The ministry said that all European countries have found the opportunity to provide themselves with alternative energy carriers from the United States of America and the Middle East. All except two EU member states: Hungary and Slovakia, which are now trying to maintain their dependence on Russia.

they wrote.

The Hungarian Foreign Minister he reacted like that to the claims of the Ukrainian foreign ministry that reality exists, there are rights and obligations. The reality is that in the EU, the member states jointly and unanimously decide on the admission of new members, the yes vote of each member state is required.

Among the rights is the sovereign right of each country to decide from where and by what route it receives the energy carriers necessary for its operation. No one from the outside has a say in this.

“A country that signs an association agreement with the EU, or even wants to become a member of the EU, is obliged to contribute to the EU’s energy security by providing transport routes. Therefore, the closure of either the natural gas or crude oil transport routes is unacceptable and contrary to the expectations related to EU integration,” stated Péter Szijjártó about the obligations.

There is no accelerated procedure, joining can take up to ten years

Anton Bendarzhevský, the director of the Oeconomus Economic Research Foundation, told us that there have been statements in the past that Hungary should be excluded from the European Union, and that Ukraine would gladly take its place.

However, these statements have no legal or factual basis. Hungary will not leave the European Union and NATO, not least because the majority of the Hungarian population supports both memberships, while the Hungarian leaders have not made such statements either.

According to the director of Oeconomus, it would not make much sense to target a foreign decision-maker in a political communication carried out by Ukraine, so it is more likely that they are shooting at the domestic audience.

If Ukraine thought there were limited seats available around the European Union table, it could fill the seat of the most recent member to leave, Great Britain leaving the European Union in 2020. However, there is of course no question of the EU being a company with a fixed number of employees.

Anton Bendarzhevskii drew attention to the fact that Ukraine has started on the path to joining the European Union, but it is a long process. The 35 European Union chapters must be fulfilled, in which areas Ukraine must bring itself into line with European Union legislation. This presupposes the adoption of thousands of new laws, which must then be checked by the European bodies to ensure that this was not only done on paper, but also works in practice. This in itself is a process of many years.

– emphasized the expert, adding that Finland joined in four or five years, but by the time this happened, the country was so deeply integrated into the European Union institutions that it went much faster for them.

In addition, those who have joined so far have not been at war, so Ukraine is particularly burdened by the fact that they are in a much more vulnerable position economically and politically now, it is much more difficult to fulfill these European requirements than before.

“So they shouldn’t be under any illusions, and a lot of things are not up to them. It will be a long process. I am confident that Ukraine will definitely become a member of the EU. The reality is that we are talking about a process of at least ten years, but it may be even longer than that,” he said.

According to the director of Oeconomus, joining NATO is much more difficult than joining the EU. Attacking Ukraine was not about NATO for Russia, it is about imperial thinking along imperial spheres of interest, Russia is making demands on Ukraine, and that is why it will be difficult for Ukraine to join. If the goal for Vladimir Putin is to acquire Ukraine, even if it seems that they cannot achieve this goal in a short time,

then they will try to fulfill it in four or five years.

“If, say, they succeed in achieving a freeze, I have no doubt that Russia will once again be ready to get what it has not been able to get. It is precisely in this sense that it is a fundamental need for Ukraine to ensure its long-term security so that Russia cannot attack it. But since NATO expansion requires a consensus decision, I do not see the reality of Ukraine being admitted to NATO, simply because Ukraine’s NATO membership will pose a security challenge to the other members. There will be a risk that after the freeze, the war could break out again at any time, and then Ukraine must be protected. On the other hand, there will also be a risk that, as a NATO member, Ukraine might try to recover the lost territories militarily. NATO membership is therefore only realistic for the time being if Russia weakens. Ukraine’s NATO membership could have been a reality in the early 2000s, as the Baltic states also joined NATO, then there were much more chances. Now, alongside the current strong Russian state, we are talking about a nuclear superpower, so there is little chance of that happening here,” explained the expert.

This is how the Ukrainian accession currently stands

In connection with Ukraine’s EU and NATO accession aspirations, significant developments have taken place in the recent period. They signed an association agreement with the European Union back in 2014, which entered into force in 2017. This envisaged closer political and economic cooperation.

In the wake of the Russian attack, the EU gave Ukraine the status of a candidate for membership in an accelerated procedure in 2022, and a year later the start of accession negotiations was also given the green light.

In the case of NATO, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken last year he put it like thatthat Ukraine will become a NATO member, but not now.

This is related to the fact that one of the tenets of NATO’s founding document is that it does not accept a state that is at war as a member, because otherwise it would have to go to war immediately on the side of the new member.

Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen recently a to Reuters he spoke about Finland’s support for Ukraine’s NATO membership, hopefully not in the distant future, since the only credible security guarantee for Ukraine in the long term is Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.

“Three years ago, no one thought that Finland or Sweden would join NATO. Yet here we are, you never know,” said the foreign minister.

Meanwhile, however, US President-elect Donald Trump has declared that he sympathizes with Russia’s position that Ukraine should not be a member of NATO. Trump’s allies believe that Ukrainian membership would be an unnecessary provocation to Moscow.

Meanwhile, the president who took office on January 20 called on European NATO members to increase their defense spending from 2 percent to 5 percent of their gross domestic product.