Orban, Putin to discuss gas, nuclear, vaccines, ever-closer ties, in Moscow next month

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will visit Moscow on 1 February to discuss Rosatom’s expansion of Hungary’s sole nuclear power station in Paks,” his top diplomat revealed in an interview with Russian state news agency TASS.

“We would like to see the two new reactors operational by the end of this decade,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told TASS. “With these two new reactors and having the current four reactors in place and with the solar investments which are in progress also Hungary will be (self-sufficent for) electricity,” he said. Hungary will also negotiate an increase its Russian gas supply deal. “It will be very favourable for us to increase the volume within the long term contract,”  he said.

Also on the agenda will be Hungarian production of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. “We are now constructing our national vaccine factory, which is going to be operational by autumn this year. And we want this factory to be involved in the production of Sputnik. And we have already started negotiations there,” Szijjarto said. “By autumn we would like to be a manufacturing place for Sputnik because we see that there’s a big market for the vaccines in the future.”

Realpolitik aside, Szijjarto also told TASS: “We Hungarians would like to send a national research astronaut to the International Space Station by the middle of this decade to operate in the framework of cooperation with Russia.” Orban hinted at plans to meet with Putin on December 21. They last met in Budapest in 2019.