Construction of a delayed project to build two new nuclear power plants at the Paks site in Hungary will begin by early February 2026, foreign minister Péter Szijjártó said after meeting Alexey Likhachev, director-general of Russia’s state nuclear corporation, in Moscow this week.

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and Russian president Vladimir Putin signed an agreement in 2014 to build two new VVER-1200 nuclear reactor units at Paks, about 120 km south of the capital Budapest in central Hungary. The cost has been put at about €12.5bn ($15.6bn).

The project, known as Paks 2, was delayed in 2017 by what Budapest called “European Union regulatory hurdles” and further hindered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which led to sanctions on several Russian entities involved in the project.