With Moscow making $180 billion from its oil exports last year, “it’s actually absurd to allow them to make this money by transporting this oil through Ukrainian territory, if the money is then being used to kill us,” Sovsun added.
But Sovsun also hinted at a secondary aim for the ban: To overturn Hungary’s opposition to weapons deliveries to Ukraine and Kyiv’s accession to the EU.
“We have really tried all the diplomatic solutions, and they never worked,” she said. “So it seems like we have to find some other approaches in how to talk to them.”
It’s not only Hungary caught up in the sanctions net: Slovakia’s major refiner Slovnaft buys crude from Lukoil. But a spokesperson for the country’s economy ministry told POLITICO that the firm has found alternative supplies and, so far, “the supply of Russian oil to Slovakia has not been halted.”
The sanctions, which force Kyiv’s pipeline operator UkrTransNafta to reject applications for Lukoil-contracted oil to pass through Druzhba, so far don’t target other Russian oil firms that continue to ship crude via Ukraine, including Rosneft and Tatneft.
That’s partly because the pipeline continues to ship non-Russian oil from Kazakhstan to Germany, said Olena Lapenko, a Ukrainian energy security expert at the DiXi Group think tank. But after Lukoil, “sanctions against other companies producing and exporting Russian oil are on the way,” she predicted.