Russian oil supplies through Druzhba pipeline restart after attack

BUDAPEST (Reuters) -Russian crude oil supplies to Hungary and Slovakia through the Druzhba pipeline have restarted after an outage caused by a Ukrainian attack in Russia last week, Hungarian oil company MOL and Slovakia's economy minister said on Thursday.

Slovakia and Hungary continue to cover the majority of their oil needs from Russia and are keen to keep those supplies coming despite European Union efforts to diversify from Russian commodities.

The supplies were interrupted repeatedly last week and there had been no flows since August 21 after Ukraine struck the Unecha pumping station on the pipeline.

Slovak Economy Minister Denisa Sakova informed about the resumption of supplies through the Druzhba pipeline in a Facebook post.

"I hope the operations will remain stable and there will be no more attacks on energy infrastructure," Sakova said.

MOL, which operates refineries in Hungary and Slovakia, said oil has arrived to both countries, but gave no details.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Wednesday that shipments could resume on Thursday in test mode at lower than standard volumes.

The refineries have covered the outage from their reserves without interrupting operations. A longer-term outage could force the tapping of state reserves and eventually lead to higher imports through an alternative pipeline from Croatia.

(Reporting by Jan Lopatka in Prague and Anita Komuves in BudapestEditing by Tomasz Janowski)