Hungary has escalated calls for Central Eastern Europe to diversify its gas imports, despite the nation enjoying strong trade relationship with Russia.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto voiced his support for European Union efforts to procure the fuel from sources other than Russia as he celebrated forging a multinational deal over imports from Azerbaijan.

“I am representing a country that has no significant gas reserves. Therefore, we are dependent on others. For this reason [gas supply] diversification is key,” Szijjarto said at a ceremony in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, on Tuesday.

He said the best response to the current energy crisis is for Europe to procure more gas from a wider range of sources and different routes.

Szijjarto delivered his statement during the signing of a memorandum of understanding among regional gas transmission operators and Azerbaijan’s state oil and gas producer, Socar.

Code-named Solidarity Ring, the MoU calls for joint efforts in fostering mutual co-operation between Bulgaria’s Bulgartransgaz, Romania’s Transgaz, Hungary’s FGSZ and Slovakia’s Eustream in distributing gas being delivered from Azerbaijan to Eastern Europe.

“From the Central European perspective, the best and most efficient solution is if the gas is procured from Azerbaijan,” Szijjarto said.

“The development of the Central-Eastern European [gas] infrastructure is going to be our task. However, financing a such project is going to be the EU’s partial responsibility,” he said.

However, since last year, Hungary has been cut out of the EU’s infrastructure financing under the EU Treaty’s Rule of Law following concerns of possible mishandling of EU funds and the lack of country’s progress on implementing an agreed set of reforms.

Szijjarto said that Hungary’s government is ready to undertake all the necessary infrastructure developments to connect Romania’s transmission network with Slovakia, thus enabling Slovakia to import 5 billion cubic metres of gas per annum from Azerbaijan, and other sources, via Hungary.

Such volume is sufficient to cover almost all Slovakia domestic consumption.

Slovakia currently receives about 35 million cubic metres per day of Russian gas by pipeline across war-torn Ukraine, pumping most of the gas to the Czech Republic and Austria.

However, Hungary is supplied by Russia’s Gazprom via the TurkStream pipeline, running across the Black Sea to Turkey and continuing via Bulgaria and Serbia, with gas supplies to the country remaining outside war-related risks and running on preferential terms.

Earlier this month, Hungary and Romania signed an MoU, aiming to invest in the pipeline capacity expansion in Romania to enable Budapest to import 2.5 Bcm per annum of gas from Romania’s greenfield offshore gas development project in the Black Sea.