“The consequences of the armed conflict are becoming increasingly serious. We are now in the eleventh, if not the twelfth, hour.

Proposals that lead to the escalation of the war must be put aside and everybody should now concentrate on creating peace,” Péter Szijjártó was cited by the foreign ministry as saying.

“Hundreds of people die and tens of thousands of people flee from Ukraine every day, while the European economy is sinking into a deeper and deeper recession and the crisis of energy supplies will become a lot more serious than anticipated,” Szijjártó said, adding that soaring energy price would “practically stymie” the continent’s economy.

He said that “unless there is peace soon, the war’s consequences will be even more tragic with many more thousand people dying and further tens and hundreds of thousands forced to leave their homes”.

The foreign minister called it a further major threat that Ukraine’s and Russia’s agricultural exports would remain well below the normal pre-war levels.

“Several hundreds of millions of people are not getting today the food they need with a vast majority of these people living in regions of the world that are unfortunately prone to destabilisation, regions from where waves of illegal migration would often originate,” Szijjártó said, adding that he would ask his EU colleagues “to put the focus on creating peace”.