Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó and Alexey Likhachev, director-general of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom, have agreed at a meeting to speed up the Paks nuclear power station expansion project.

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 the Paks site, about 120 km south of the capital Budapest in central Hungary.

However, earlier this month the European Court of Justice struck down EU approval for Russia to build the new plants, arguing that it was unclear whether Orbán’s government followed EU procurement rules when awarding Rosatom the contract without a public tender.