Trump considers granting Hungary exemption on Russian oil just weeks after imposing sanctions
President Donald Trump said Friday during a bilateral meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban that he is considering granting an exemption on Russian oil sanctions to allow Hungary to...
By Fox News · Fox News
President Donald Trump said Friday during a bilateral meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban that he is considering granting an exemption on Russian oil sanctions to allow Hungary to purchase the resource from Russia. "We're looking at it because it's very difficult for him to get the oil and gas from other areas," Trump said Friday when asked by the media if he is prepared to grant Orban's request for an exemption on the Russian oil sanctions. "As you know, they don't have, they don't have the advantage of having sea, it's a great country." "It's a big country. But they don't have sea, they don't have the ports," he continued. "And so they have a difficult problem. There's another country that has that same problem, by the way. But when you look at what's happened with Europe, many of those countries, they don't have those problems and they buy a lot of oil and gas from Russia. And as you know, I'm very disturbed by that because we're helping them and they're going and buying oil and gas from Russia." After months of waffling between confrontation and conciliation toward Moscow, Trump imposed sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies — Rosneft and Lukoil — in October as the Kremlin backed off from talks to end the war with Ukraine. TRUMP FREEZES OUT PUTIN FOR LACK OF ‘ENOUGH ACTION’ TOWARD PEACE — FUTURE TALKS UNCERTAIN "Every time I speak to Vladimir, I have good conversations, and then they don’t go anywhere," Trump said in October when announcing the sanctions. "They just don’t go anywhere." "I just felt it was time, we’ve waited a long time," Trump added when asked why he chose to impose the sanctions at that time and not sooner. The sanctions came after a planned meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in October was called off. Orban, who has a longstanding warm relationship with Trump, in October called the sanctions imposed by Trump "a mistake," from Hungary's perspective. "We are thinking about how to build a sustainab…