“Uzbekistan is sending 500 thousand face masks to Hungary; the cargo plane shipping these will be arriving on Tuesday evening”, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said at an online press conference on Tuesday.

Mr. Szijjártó held a video conference with Deputy Prime-Minister for Investments and Foreign Economic Affairs - Minister of Investments and Foreign Trade of the Republic of Uzbekistan  Sardor Uktamovich Umurzakov.

“The challenges are the same everywhere; the Uzbekistani government is also working to find a balance between the strictness of healthcare measures and maintaining the functioning of the economy”, he stated. “We agreed that both are the duty of the state: to protect the lives and health of their own citizens, but also to assure the functioning of the economy and the opportunity for it to be rebooted and begin to grow again”, he explained.

“We also agreed that the global pandemic will have long-term consequences, meaning that all strategies must also handle its long-term effects”, Mr. Szijjártó emphasised. “The approach of the two countries is also similar with respect to the fact that we are deploying both traditional and totally new economic policy instruments”, he stated.

“Uzbekistan has already sent 150 thousand face masks to Hungary, which arrived on 28 March and have been distributed to healthcare institutions”, he recalled. “Uzbekistan has now donated another 500 thousand face masks; they are already on route to Baku, to where a plane has set out from Budapest, and after the cargo is transferred the plane will be arriving back in Budapest on Tuesday evening with the shipment”, he said.

“It is a wonderful thing that even in these difficult times there are friendly nations on which we can rely”, the Minster highlighted. “The list of countries that have requested assistance from Hungary is very long, and we have helped many, but the list of countries that have offered assistance is very short”, he stated. “What these countries have in common is that they all lie to the east of Hungary, and with the exception of China they are all members of the Turkic Council, in which Hungary has had observer status for almost two years now”, he added.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade also said that in the interests of assuring that cooperation is as good as possible in the long term, Hungary has increased the number of scholarship places for students from Uzbekistan to attend Hungarian universities from thirty to one hundred.

(MTI)