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Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has requested a meeting with the Polish government of Donald Tusk to end a crippling border blockade by Polish farmers demanding tighter restrictions on Ukrainian food imports.
Zelenskyy said he was ready to travel to the Polish border by Saturday to negotiate with Tusk over an end to a farming blockade that has undermined Ukraine’s war effort against Russia. Saturday is the second anniversary of the outbreak of the full-scale conflict.
“The border blockade, unfortunately, increases the threat to the supply of weapons to our warriors on the front lines,” said Zelenskky on Wednesday. “This is about national security. This must not be delayed.”
Protesters at six road crossings have blocked or disrupted the passage of about 7,000 trucks waiting to enter Poland from Ukraine and 2,500 seeking to travel in the other direction, as well as Ukrainian rail imports.
Ukraine’s border queue registration site estimates that the trucks could be forced to wait for between 13 days and two months to cross, which could return the border to a similar crisis situation to late last year when protesting Polish hauliers blockaded crossings for more than two months.
The agriculture protests boiled over on Tuesday when some Polish farmers spilled Ukrainian grain from waiting freight trains, sparking outrage in Kyiv.
Ukraine’s infrastructure minister Oleksiy Kubrakov accused the protesters of being “out of control”, while the country’s ambassador to Poland called for Polish police to punish the farmers involved.
Poland’s border blockade came as EU ambassadors signed off on an extension to trade measures that allow Ukrainian agricultural products to pass into the EU tariff-free, part of the reason for the gluts of grain that have prompted farmers’ protests.
The renewed measures allow member states to introduce an emergency brake and impose tariffs on imports of poultry, eggs and sugar if they rise above average volumes for 2022-2023.
Poland, Hungary and Slovakia opposed the extension, saying that all Ukrainian agricultural imports should come under the emergency tariff regime.
Tusk, who became prime minister in December, has sought to improve relations with Kyiv and offered full support for its war effort, but without upsetting farmers and other domestic economic interests.
His unwieldy ruling coalition contains politicians who represent farmers, including Michał Kołodziejczak, the secretary of state for agriculture who founded the Agrounia farming movement. Protests that included Agrounia prompted the former Polish government to introduce a unilateral import ban on Ukrainian grain in April last year, in violation of EU common trade policy.
Kołodziejczak told broadcaster Polsat on Tuesday that “we don’t want to silence the protests, we just want to solve the problem”. He said Poland was ready to introduce further restrictions on Ukrainian food exports and that “the ball is in Ukraine’s court”.
Ukraine relies heavily on its western borders for travel and trade, with commercial and cargo flights suspended and its ports blocked. Passenger cross-border traffic was also disrupted by the farmers’ protests, although cars were allowed to cross again on Wednesday.
The farmers’ dispute is the latest disruption to trade over the Poland-Ukraine border. Thousands of trucks were forced to queue at border crossings between the two countries late last year because of a blockade by Polish truckers, backed by farmers, to complain about unfair competition from Ukrainian drivers. Tusk’s government got the truckers to end their protest in January.
As well as an end to duty-free food imports from Ukraine, the Polish farmers want to remove EU climate change limitations on pesticides and fertilisers.
The protests in Poland comes as farmers across Europe have taken to the streets to voice anger about a range of issues. French farmers have rekindled protests despite the government making a series of pledges to address their concerns. Spanish farmers also drove hundreds of tractors into central Madrid on Wednesday.
Additional reporting by Leila Abboud in Paris, Alice Hancock in Brussels and Carmen Muela in Madrid
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