Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Facebook on Wednesday that Turkic countries play a key role in Hungary’s energy supply, adding that if Hungary wanted cheap energy, it needed friends rather than enemies.

Speaking in connection with the ongoing informal meeting of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) in Budapest, PM Orbán noted that Ukraine had shut down the pipeline system linking Russia and Hungary. This would have put Hungary in "an impossible and even tragic situation" if it had not established close cooperation with the Turkic states in the previous years, he added.

"You may recall -- President Erdogan certainly does -- the intense debates in the west about whether the TurkStream pipeline should be allowed to be built," the prime minister said.

He said the "westerners" had done everything they could to prevent the pipeline from being built, "but we persevered and we built it."

"If this pipeline system didn’t exist today, Hungary wouldn’t have gas and it wouldn’t have energy," PM Orbán said.