BAKU, Azerbaijan, November 25. Hungary is interested in piling up gas imports from Azerbaijan to some 1 billion cubic meters annually, Hungary’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said in an exclusive interview with TurkicWorld, as he visited Azerbaijan.

He noted that Hungary would like to diversify its energy sources, including the gas sources and the delivery routes.

“For us diversification doesn’t mean that there would be replacement of the current sources with other ones. Diversification for us means that we add new sources to our energy mix. Therefore, Azerbaijan is a very important partner of cooperation. We have already agreed on terms of delivering 100 million cubic meters of gas from Azerbaijan to Hungary already this year. We are interested in piling it up to some 1 billion cubic meters annually,” said the minister.

Unfortunately, said Szijjártó, it does not exclusively depend on Azerbaijan and Hungary.

“It depends on the infrastructure, capacity of the delivery routes through the South-Eastern Europe. We have already turned to the European Commission to help us with financial means in order to increase the capacity of the infrastructure in the South-Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, so far, the EU is rejective, which is unacceptable from our perspective. They say that within 15 years gas is not going to be part of the national energy mix. We say, number one: we don’t know and number two: even if it is the case, what happens in the next 14 years? While European Commission is putting pressure on us to diversify sources, but they are not ready to take part in financing the capacity increase of the South-East European infrastructure. But we are working together with Azerbaijan, Türkiye, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia in order to find solutions,” he said.