Author: Christina Tan and Julia Payne
BUDAPEST/BRUSSELS, April 22 (Reuters) – Russian oil began flowing through the Ukrainian leg of the Druzhba pipeline on Wednesday after months of pause, officials said, allowing Hungary to lift its veto on a 90 billion euro ($105.79 billion) EU loan that Ukraine desperately needs.
The Druzhba pipeline has become one of the most politically charged pieces of infrastructure in Europe since Russian drone strikes damaged the pipeline in western Ukraine and blocked Russian oil deliveries to Hungary and Slovakia.
Hungarian oil group MOL said on Wednesday that Ukraine had informed it that Russian crude oil shipments had resumed through the pipeline.
“MOL expects that the first batch of crude oil from the restart of part of Ukraine’s pipeline system will arrive in Hungary and Slovakia at the latest tomorrow,” the company said in a statement.
Technical details of supplying oil through the Druzhba pipeline are being discussed at company level, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian news outlet Izvestia.
“MOL is also involved in this matter. We are in contact through company channels. I don’t know the details because there should be a request for water pumping… This is actually a company issue,” Peskov said.
EU loan approved soon after pumping resumes
An industry source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said pumping began at 0935 GMT.
Soon after, EU ambassadors met in Brussels to approve the loan. The EU’s 27 member states are expected to formally sign the deal on Thursday afternoon.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the EU’s decision was “the right signal to send under the current circumstances.” Zelensky wrote in X that “only when support for Ukraine and pressure on Russia are sufficient will there be motivation for Russia to end the war in Ukraine.”
The EU agreed in principle to the loan last year to maintain Ukraine’s liquidity until 2026 and 2027, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the Slovak government blocked the loan, accusing Ukraine of delaying repairs to the pipeline, which Kyiv denied.
Hungary and Slovakia both rely heavily on Russian oil, and Orban has always expressed support for Russia.
Hungary changes prime minister
When Orban lost Hungary’s parliamentary election on April 12, Ukraine’s prospects for receiving the loan had improved. Victory party leader Peter Magyar said he would no longer block EU funding for Ukraine, but he is not expected to take power until next month.
Druzhba (Russian for “friendship”) has a production capacity of 1.2 million to 1.4 million barrels of oil per day, with the potential to increase to 2 million barrels per day. However, traffic has dropped to a fraction of that due to Western sanctions and repeated disruptions from drone strikes.
Separately, Germany confirmed that its PCK Schwedt refinery, one of Kazakhstan’s largest refineries, will no longer receive supplies of Kazakh crude from May, after industry sources said on Tuesday that Russia would stop Kazakhstan’s oil exports through the Druzhba pipeline.
(1 USD = 0.8511 Euro)
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Anna Pruchnicka, Krisztina Than, Jan Lopatka, Julia Payne, Bart Meijer, Lili Bayer; Writing by Jan Strupczewski and Ingrid Melander; Editing by Tomasz Janowski, Barbara Lewis, Kirsten Donovan, Will Dunham and Ron Popeski)