The EU said on Thursday it had proposed a mission to inspect a blocked oil pipeline at the centre of a row between Ukraine and Hungary, and was waiting for Kyiv to respond.

Hungary and Slovakia accuse Kyiv of deliberately delaying reopening the Druzhba pipeline, which pumps Russian oil to the two landlocked states, and Ukraine says it was damaged by Russian strikes in January.

European Union member Hungary has, in turn, blocked a vital 90-billion-euro EU loan to Ukraine and a fresh round of sanctions on Russia.

“We have proposed a mission to inspect the pipeline to Ukraine,” Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, told journalists in Brussels. “We are awaiting their response.”

The suggestion of an EU fact-finding mission came on the back of two weeks of “intense discussions and contact with Ukraine on this issue”, she added.

On Wednesday, Budapest said it had sent its own mission to assess the pipeline and hold talks with Ukrainian authorities – only for Kyiv to deny that any discussions were planned.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week it could take four to six weeks to make the pipeline operational again.

The dispute comes as Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has ramped up political attacks on Ukraine ahead of Hungary’s closely fought parliamentary election on 12 April.

Orbán, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in the EU, has also urged the 27-nation bloc to suspend sanctions on Russian oil and gas to counter rising prices since the Middle East war erupted.

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