After Sunday’s extraordinary meeting of the State Defense Council, the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs declared that Hungary “will provide military protection for the TurkStream gas pipeline from the Serbian-Hungarian border to the Hungarian-Slovak border due to the threat of a Ukrainian attack.” TASR informs about this according to the reports of the MTI agency and the telex.hu server.
Szijjártó said that after the incident, he spoke with the energy ministers of Turkey and Serbia, as well as with Russian Deputy Energy Minister Pavel Sorokin. According to the statement of the Hungarian Department of Diplomacy, they agreed on the protection of the gas pipeline along the entire length of the European section.
Explosives near the gas pipeline
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić announced on Sunday that the army and police had found two backpacks with explosives “several hundred meters” from a gas pipeline leading to Hungary in the northern Serbian town of Kanjiža.
Kanjiža is located in Vojvodina about 10 kilometers from the border with Hungary. The Balkan Stream gas pipeline, an extension of the TurkStream gas pipeline, which transports Russian gas to Serbia and Hungary, runs through its territory.
Criticism of Ukraine and Brussels
Szijjártó called the finding of explosives “an attempt at a serious attack on Hungary’s sovereignty”. He said Europe was heading for a huge energy crisis and criticized the European Commission for “absurd proposals such as reducing the speed limit on motorways by 10 kilometers per hour, or for people to carpool to work, or to simply stay at home”.
“Ukraine, together with Brussels as its partner, is implementing very tough measures to try to cut off the supply of Russian oil and natural gas to Europe,” Szijjártó declared, adding that “the Ukrainians previously blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline and are now blocking oil supplies to Hungary and Slovakia via the Druzhba pipeline.”
According to Szijjártó, the TurkStream gas pipeline has been the target of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory several times. “The terrorist attack and sabotage attempt that the Serbs foiled fits into this series of attacks,” he said, noting that enough explosives were found near a gas pipeline in Vojvodina to blow it up.
“We have ordered the strengthening of military protection and control of the Hungarian section of the TurkStream gas pipeline,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán confirmed after the meeting of the State Defense Council. According to him, 60 percent of his gas consumption flows to Hungary via TurkStream.
Reaction of Ukraine
Like Szijjártó, Orbán suspects Ukraine of planning an attack. The spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Heorhiy Tychy, wrote in response on the X social network that Kyiv “categorically rejects attempts to falsely associate Ukraine with the incident.”
“Ukraine has nothing to do with this. It is most likely a Russian false flag operation, part of Moscow’s massive interference in Hungarian elections,” he wrote.
TurkStream is currently the only route for the export of Russian pipeline gas to Europe. The transit of Russian gas through Ukrainian territory was stopped from January 2025 after Ukraine did not extend the relevant agreement with Russia. The pipeline supplies several European countries, including Slovakia.
