EU to unfreeze €550 million for Hungary as sanctions talks stall

The European Commission plans to release about €550 millions in blocked EU funds to Hungary in a bid to overcome Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s veto of the bloc’s latest sanctions package against Russia.

Brussels is under growing pressure from Washington to escalate measures against Moscow by halting all energy imports and targeting companies in countries such as India and China that continue to buy Russian oil, Caliber.Az reports, citing the Financial Times.

The U.S. push comes as President Donald Trump’s efforts to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine falter.

Adopting new sanctions requires unanimous agreement among EU members, but Hungary and Slovakia — the last remaining importers of Russian oil in the bloc — have threatened to veto the measures.

EU ambassadors discussed the new sanctions proposal on September 19. The commission said this week the package would target “crypto, banks and energy” and accelerate the EU’s timetable to phase out Russian fossil fuel imports by 2027.

Orbán, who faces parliamentary elections next year, has resisted cutting Hungary’s reliance on cheap Russian energy and has repeatedly delayed sanctions against Moscow.

The commission froze about €22 billion in EU funds for Hungary in 2022 over concerns about judicial independence, asylum rights, LGBT+ discrimination and academic freedom. But Brussels has since released portions of the money to win Orbán’s support for other measures. 

In 2023, it unfroze €10 billion to persuade Budapest to drop its veto of Ukrainian aid, and earlier this year Hungary obtained €157 million by exploiting a legal loophole that allows governments to reallocate frozen funds to different programmes.

By Sabina Mammadli