ST. PETERSBURG, June 2. /TASS/. Political and economic sanctions against Russia did not work, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said addressing the session dubbed Europe at crossroads: Risks and Prospects at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
"When it comes to sanctions, we are always pushing for a rational debate about the impact of sanctions, because we think that it would be really necessary that from time to time we talk about the impacts of such important decisions," he said. "Unfortunately we didn’t have it so far, because whenever we raised this issue, debate went emotional," Szijjarto added.
"But if you look at the facts, then we have to admit the sanctions have failed both politically and economically," he went on to say. "We lost 6.7 billion dollars of export opportunities in the last three years to Russia and the former Soviet republics," the Hungarian top diplomat pointed out.
"Politically speaking, the EU attached a very clear political goal to the sanctions, saying that sanctions should help to have some further progress towards the full implementation of the Minsk agreements," Szijjarto noted.
"Now the question is wherever we had any kind of further progress regarding the full implementation of the Minsk agreements? Definitely not. Have the sanctions helped? No," he said adding that "the Minsk agreements should be fully implemented."
The Hungarian foreign minister also said that sanctions were not the answer but Budapest did not intend to undermine the European Union’s unity and use its right to veto.
The 2017 the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum taking place in Russia’s second largest city on June 1-3. The forum is dubbed Achieving a New Balance in the Global Economic Arena. TASS news agency is the general information partner and the official photohost agency of the event. The agency is also the operator of the forum’s presentation zone.