Viktor Orbán: Hungary is not only negotiating resources with the EU
It is worth clarifying that only two of the seven major EU scutage packages so far relate to Russian energy carriers: from the beginning of August, the import of Russian coal into the EU is prohibited, and from the beginning of December, the import of Russian crude oil will apply, and from next February, it will also apply to refined products. the yellow ban (Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are temporarily exempted from pipeline Russian oil in view of the Friendship pipeline.) there is no current sanction for Russian pipeline or liquefied gas, and this is not expected, because many countries, including Hungary, are heavily dependent on it.What is currently on the table in Brussels is, for example, the question of the price cap placed on the Dutch TTF gas exchange, which would also set an upper limit for the gas received under the Hungarian-Russian gas contract. A price cap that is not guaranteed directly, exclusively for Russian pipeline gas transport, would no longer support this. Viktor Orbán is hungry for the fact that in June the price of gas was still 100 euros/MWh, and then as soon as the sanction for gas was also on the agenda (but a decision was made on it since then and not realistic), jumped many times, due to the above it is worth adding that the drastic increase in gas prices it was essentially formed due to the conscious actions of the Russian political leadership. The background to this was that, in exchange for the anti-oil and other sanctions, which were painful for the Russians, they wanted to strike back at Europe (and “recover” for example their seized Russian central bank reserves) where Europe hurts the most (gas market) and for this purpose, they even sacrificed their status as a reliable gas supplier, which few thought before. As the Prime Minister put it: the EU and Russia are in an economic war with each other, which happened on the Russian side to restrict gas deliveries to Europe more and more, citing more and more financial (e.g. switching to ruble accounting) and technical excuses (e.g. the turbine issue) starting in the spring. By the summer, we got to the point where Gazprom reduced the Nord Stream 1 to a minimum, and since then it has stopped the delivery, so it is currently the fifth year of the usual Russian gas delivery to the EU. This is what primarily drove up the price of gas, and it must be remembered that the large gas producers (e.g. Norway, Algeria, Qatar, the United States) can only make up for it from the Russians to a limited extent in the short term. lost gas, because the restrained investments in the fossil industry in recent years represent a limit on production capacity. It is also worth noting that, as can be seen in the figure below: the TTF gas price has essentially halved from around 340 euros at the end of August to close to 170, even though the sanctions policy has not changed. It is generally true that the development of the gas price was not driven by the actions of the sanctions policy, but by the perceived risks surrounding the gas supply – in other words, the actions of the Russian supplier (probably in violation of the contract).This is also shown by the substantial drop in the price of gas observed in recent weeks (see below). Of course, this was not caused by the changes introduced in the sanctions (there was no such change), but, for example, by the fact that one of the elements of the five-point proposal package in Brussels considered the above-mentioned price cap for stock market transactions and the high level of European storage also worked against the price increase.