BUDAPEST, July 23. /TASS/. Western companies are not willing to leave Russia despite the sanctions, as they understand that Russia’s economy will still remain part of the global one, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Saturday in his speech at the Free University and the summer student camp in the Romanian town of Baile Tusnad (Harghita County) in Transylvania.
The prime minister said that, according to his information, 88% of pharmaceutical, 79% of mining, 70% of energy and 77% of other European industrial companies that were operating in Russia at the beginning of 2022 were still staying in the country.
"Of the 1,400 major Western companies, only 8.5% have left Russia," said Orban, whose speech was aired by Hungarian television channel M1. According to the prime minister, foreign companies paid $3.5 billion to the Russian budget in 2022.
The prime minister said that there is an attempt to "disconnect Russia" from the European economy through sanctions in order to exert political pressure on Moscow. However, he is convinced that this will not have the desired effect, since Russia’s economy is intertwined with the rest of the world, including in the energy sector.
"Somebody else is buying Russian raw materials, while we are suffering from military inflation and losing our competitiveness," he said.
Orban pointed out that before sanctions were imposed on Russia, the European Union countries had annually paid about 300 billion euros for oil and gas, whereas they paid 653 billion euros last year. Europe will not be able to compete with the rest of the world as long as energy supplies are twice as expensive as they used to be, Orban believes.