BUDAPEST, March 25 (Reuters) - Hungary will gradually stop sending natural gas to Ukraine until crude oil flows on the Druzhba pipeline resume, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Wednesday, escalating a standoff with Kyiv over energy supplies disrupted by the war.
Hungary and Slovakia, whose leaders are outliers in the EU for maintaining relations with Moscow, blame Kyiv for an outage on the Druzhba oil pipeline that supplies their refineries with Russian crude pumped through Ukraine.
Kyiv says the pipeline was damaged by a Russian drone attack in late January and it is fixing it as fast as it can.
"We are gradually halting gas deliveries from Hungary to Ukraine, and will store the gas that remains with us in Hungary," Orban said in a video posted on Facebook.
According to data on Hungarian pipeline operator FGSZ's website, gas shipments were continuing to Ukraine on Wednesday morning.
Data from Ukraine's gas transmission system operator shows that Ukraine will receive 8.3 mcm of gas from Hungary on Wednesday, the same volume as on Tuesday. Ukraine plans to import a total of 25 mcm of gas from Eastern Europe on Wednesday.
For March, Ukraine contracted 180 mcm of gas from Hungary, or 28% of the total, an industry source told Reuters earlier this month. In February, 200 mcm were contracted, that is, 31% of the total.
Ukraine's state energy company Naftogaz and Ukraine's energy ministry were not immediately available for comment.
Last week, European Union leaders failed to convince Orban - who is running for re-election next month - to lift his blockade on a 90-billion-euro ($104.36 billion) EU loan to help Ukraine.
Orban also flagged earlier that Hungary could cut electricity exports to Ukraine if oil flows on Druzhba do not resume.
Last week EU experts arrived in Ukraine to assess the condition of the pipeline after Kyiv said it had accepted the EU offer of technical support and funding to restore oil flows,
However, Ukraine also signalled at the time that any resumption of crude deliveries to Hungary and Slovakia was still weeks away.
($1 = 0.8624 euros)
(Reporting by Anita Komuves in Budapest and Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
