BUDAPEST (Reuters) – Hungary’s foreign minister on Monday accused his Polish counterpart of lying, as simmering tensions concerning Warsaw and Budapest’s differences over Ukraine erupted into a diplomatic spat.
Once close allies, relations between Poland and Hungary have soured over Budapest’s decision to maintain warm economic and diplomatic ties with Russia, and more recently its blocking of European Union refunds for member states that gave munitions to Kyiv.
Tensions became even more pronounced when a new pro-EU government came to power in Poland in December, drawing a line under a period when Warsaw and Budapest were regularly allies in disputes with the bloc over issues such as the rule of law or LGBT rights.
In an interview with online magazine Visegrad Insight published on Monday, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said that his Hungarian counterpart, Peter Szijjarto, appeared to change his mind about a Polish proposal to hold an EU meeting in Ukraine after receiving instructions from Budapest.
“(Radoslaw Sikorski) has crossed another line and lied when he claimed that I enthusiastically supported his nonsense proposal to hold the next informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in Ukraine,” Szijjarto posted on his Facebook page.
A Polish foreign ministry spokesperson said that Sikorski had the impression that Szijjarto was happy with the proposal. “If it was otherwise, it means that he (Sikorski) interpreted the behaviour of Minister Szijjarto in the wrong way,” spokesperson Pawel Wronski said.
It was just the latest in a series of heated exchanges between the two governments in recent days.
On Saturday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban delivered a speech in which he accused Poland of hypocrisy and of buying Russian oil through intermediaries.
“They lecture us on moral grounds, they criticise us for our economic relations with Russia, and at the same time they are blithely doing business with the Russians,” he said.
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Teofil Bartoszewski hit back Sunday, telling state news agency PAP that Poland did not do business with Russia and asking why Orban didn’t “create a Union with Putin and some authoritarian states of this type” rather than remaining a member of the EU and NATO.
(Reporting by Boldizsar Gyori in Budapest and Alan Charlish in Warsaw; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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