Translated by Ollie Richardson & Angelina Siard

11:31:03
12/02/2019

ria.ru

The Foreign Minister of Hungary Péter Szijjártó during a press conference with the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talking about the hypocrisy of Western countries concerning Russia. The speeches of the politicians was broadcasted by Fox News.

At the meeting Pompeo spoke about the considerable strengthening of Russia’s influence in the international arena. Besides this, he stressed that the Russian side “does not share the aspiration of freedom”.

“We must not let Putin drive wedges between friends in NATO. Hungarians know all too well from their history that an authoritarian Russia will never be a friend to the freedom and sovereignty of smaller nations”

said the US Secretary of State

In response to this, Szijjártó noted that cooperation with Moscow will not prevent Budapest from being a reliable ally for Washington and Brussels.

“And when it comes to Russia, I told the Secretary as well that there’s an enormous hypocrisy and political correctness in the European political arena in this regard. Because look, it’s not the Hungarian and it’s not the Central European energy companies which are preparing and building Nord Stream 2 together with Gazprom. It was not the Hungarian prime minister to be invited as a superstar at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, but it was the French president. It was not the leaders of the Hungarian energy companies to sit together on the stage with President Putin on the last Russian energy week, but the CEOs of the biggest Western European energy companies,” he stressed.

In addition, Szijjártó called to look at the scale of trade between European countries and Russia.

“…and you will see that we are let’s say fed up in a legitimate way that you usually portray us as having a tight relationship to Russia”

concluded the diplomat

Earlier the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hungary already said that he considers the accusations made by the European Union towards Budapest about rapprochement with Russia being too strong to be unreasonable. According to him, Brussels maintains much closer relations with Moscow, but “the only difference is that they try to hide big business behind superficial quarrels”.

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