The EU should stop adding sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and instead push for a ceasefire and the start of negotiations, a senior aide to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Thursday.
Speaking on the sidelines of a summit of EU leaders which granted Ukraine the status of a candidate to become a member of the EU, the aide said the more sanctions the EU adopted, the more they hurt the bloc, while Russia survived.
“At the end of the day Europe will be on the losing side of this war because of the economic problems. Our recommendation would be that we should stop the sanction process,” Balazs Orban, not related to the prime minister, said in an interview.
Photo: AFP
Hungary is one of the most pro-Russian EU countries, heavily dependent on Russian gas and oil. Russia is also building a nuclear reactor for Hungary. Budapest had held up the latest package of sanctions against Moscow that included a ban on Russian oil imports until it negotiated an exemption for itself.
“Right now what we experience is that the more sanctions we accept, the worse shape we are in. And the Russians? Yes, it hurts them as well, but they survive. And what is even worse, they proceed in Ukraine,” Balazs Orban said.
Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, the 27-nation EU has agreed on six packages of sanctions that include asset freezes and visa bans on Russian oligarchs and officials, export controls, freezing central bank assets, disconnecting banks from the SWIFT messaging system and a ban on imports of Russian coal and oil.
However. some officials argue that individual oligarchs can live without some of their yachts or Western villas, have probably already moved liquid assets outside the EU and export controls might be circumvented by China and others.
The freeze on the Russian central bank reserves is made less painful by the billions of US dollars Russia gets every day for its oil and gas still flowing to Europe, they say.
Once the EU stops buying Russian oil next year, the crude can be sold and shipped by tankers to China or India, some officials say.
Others say the sanctions are working, but it would take time before their full impact on the Russian economy shows.
The Hungarian prime minister, however, said the EU should change its tactics.
“We reached a point when we realize that we followed the strategy for four months, we have some achievements, but if it continues like this, according to reasonable thinking, it will end up in a bad way for Europe. So we have to think about something. Negotiations, ceasefire, peace. Diplomacy. That’s our solution,” he said.
Following unprecedented Western sanctions imposed over the invasion, a dozen European countries have so far been thumped by reductions in gas flows from Russia, triggering a frantic search for alternative supplies across the bloc.
“It is only a matter of time before the Russians close down all gas shipments,” one EU official said ahead of yesterday’s talks.
German Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck said his country was heading for a gas shortage if Russian supplies remained as low as now, and some industries would have to be shut down come winter.
“Companies would have to stop production, lay off their workers, supply chains would collapse, people would go into debt to pay their heating bills,” he told Der Spiegel magazine, adding that it was part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy to divide the country.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, has decided to slow down its 3-nanometer chip production as Intel Corp, one of its major customers, plans to push back the launch of its new Meteor Lake tGPU chipsets to the end of next year, market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. That means Intel has canceled almost all of the 3-nanometer capacity booked for next year, with only a small amount of wafer input remaining for engineering verification, the Taipei-based researcher said in a report. Based on Intel’s original schedule, TSMC was to start producing the new chipsets in
DATA SHOW DOWNTURN: Manufacturing in Taiwan contracted as production and demand slumped, while growth in chip exports last month eased in South Korea World chip sales growth has decelerated for six straight months in another sign that the global economy is straining under the weight of rising interest rates and mounting geopolitical risks. Semiconductor sales rose 13.3 percent in June from a year earlier, down from 18 percent in May, data from the global peak industry body showed. The slowdown is the longest since the US-China trade dispute in 2018. The three-month moving average in chip sales has correlated with the global economy’s performance in the past few decades. The latest weakness comes as concern about a worldwide recession has prompted chipmakers such as Samsung
Italy is close to clinching a deal initially worth US$5 billion with Intel Corp to build an advanced semiconductor packaging and assembly plant in the country, two sources briefed on discussions said yesterday. Intel’s investment in Italy is part of a wider plan announced by the US chipmaker earlier this year to invest US$88 billion in building capacity across Europe, which is striving to cut its reliance on Asian chip imports and ease a supply crunch that has curbed output in the region’s strategic auto sector. Asking not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, the sources said the
Malaysia is scrambling to protect its assets as the descendants of the last sultan of the remote Philippine region of Sulu look to enforce a US$15 billion arbitration award in a dispute over a colonial-era land deal. In 1878, two European colonists signed a deal with the sultan for the use of his territory in present-day Malaysia — an agreement that independent Malaysia honored until 2013, paying the monarch’s descendants about US$1,000 per year. Now, 144 years later after the original deal, Malaysia is on the hook for the second-largest arbitration award on record for stopping the payments after a bloody incursion