Hungary’s main oil conglomerate has said it would pay an outstanding bill owed by Russia’s oil pipeline operator to the Ukrainian authorities, clearing the way for Russian oil deliveries to resume to three Central European countries.
Analysts described the financial arrangement as an unexpected boomerang effect of sanctions imposed on Moscow.
The conglomerate, MOL Group, an administrator of the Hungarian arm of the Druzhba, or Friendship, pipeline, said on Wednesday that it had “transferred the fee due for the use of the Ukrainian section of the pipeline.”
Ukraine pledged to resume deliveries of Russian crude to the three countries, Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic, “within a matter of days,” MOL said.
The authorities in those three countries said on Tuesday that Russian oil deliveries from the pipeline had stopped last week over “technical” banking issues linked to the sanctions that Europe had imposed on Russia to punish it for invading Ukraine in February.
“This seems to be just another example of the ‘friendly fire’ from the sanctions that is going to hurt some European countries, in this case Hungary,” Vitaly Yermakov, a senior research fellow with Oxford Energy, said in an email. “Sanctioning economic activity is a blunt weapon that can have unintended consequences.”
