The agreement between Russia and Hungary has provoked Ukraine

A new gas supply agreement between Russia and Hungary has sparked disputes with Ukraine. Budapest and Kiev call each other's ambassadors. "Hungary's new agreement with Gazprom is a serious blow to Ukrainian-Hungarian relations," Oleh Nikolenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday. Kiev will take "decisive action" to defend its national interests, Russia's Interfax news agency quoted him as saying. "We are forbidding Ukraine from trying to torpedo Hungarian gas security," Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in Budapest, adding that Hungary considered it a violation of its sovereignty. Relations between neighboring countries are already tense over the dispute over the Hungarian minority in Ukraine. According to Russia, Ukraine has no right to interfere in the completion of the agreement. "No rights have been violated, no rules of international trade," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, adding that Moscow was ready to talk to Kiev about direct gas supplies. Ukraine has not bought gas from its Russian neighbor since 2015. Russian energy giant Gazprom has signed a 15-year supply contract in Budapest with the Hungarian energy company MVM Group for the supply of 4.5 billion cubic meters of gas, mainly on the so-called southern route. It runs across the Black Sea, Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia and bypasses Ukraine. Kiev has long felt that its role as the main transit country for natural gas from Russia to the European Union is threatened by the construction of new gas pipelines far from Ukraine. In particular, the former Soviet republic is opposed to the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea to Germany, which has not yet been put into operation.