Truck chaos on Polish border signals tensions
over integrating Ukraine into EU
Thousands of trucks are blocked at the border as Poles
fume Ukrainians are undercutting them in sectors ranging from freight to food.
BY WOJCIECH
KOŚĆ, VERONIKA MELKOZEROVA AND BARTOSZ BRZEZIŃSKI
NOVEMBER
29, 2023 2:11 PM CET
WARSAW —
The first thing a Ukrainian would notice entering Poland last year was
volunteer groups welcoming exhausted refugees with warm food, clothing, offers
of rooms and buses to transport them for free to cities across Poland.
Now, the
first thing Ukrainians notice is an immense line of trucks waiting to cross the
Dorohusk border checkpoint thanks to a blockade by Polish truckers that began
on November 6.
More than
3,000 trucks are now stuck at four border crossings; waiting times are as long
as three weeks and at least one driver has died while trapped. Protesters are
camped out in tents dusted with snow, warming themselves by fires in open
barrels, while drivers, dressed in hi-viz vests, stand by their trucks, many of
them smoking and looking on at the flashing blue lights of police cars
monitoring the situation.
“Drivers
are forced to wait in an open field with no proper food supplies and no proper
restrooms,” Ukraine’s Deputy Infrastructure Minister Serhiy Derkach told
POLITICO. He added the government is preparing to evacuate hundreds of trapped
drivers.
For Kyiv's
relations with Europe, the border blockade is a major crisis, and gives a
bitter foretaste of the impending challenges of integrating Ukraine, with its
huge farming sector and cheap but well-educated workers, into the EU's common
market.
Cross-border
trade flows are imperative to keep Ukraine's economy ticking over in a time of
war, but Polish truckers see Ukrainian drivers as low-cost rivals who are
undercutting their business. They've been joined by Polish farmers, outraged
that Ukrainian grain imports are hurting them by cratering domestic prices.
It's not
just Kyiv that's angry.
The
European Commission issued a blistering criticism on Wednesday of Warsaw's
“complete lack of involvement," in ending the crisis.
"The
Polish authorities are the ones who are supposed to enforce the law at that
border," Transport Commissioner Adina Vălean said in Brussels. "While
I support the right of people to protest, the entire EU — not to mention
Ukraine, a country currently at war — cannot be taken hostage by blocking our
external borders. It’s as simple as that."
Vălean
warned that if Poland doesn't act, the Commission could hit Warsaw with an
infringement for "not respecting the rules or not applying the law."
But Poland
is having a difficult time reacting thanks to the political uncertainty
unleashed by last month's parliamentary election.
Infrastructure
Minister Andrzej Adamczyk wrote an appeal on Monday to his Ukrainian
counterpart, calling on Kyiv to meet truckers' demands. What the Polish drivers
want is for the EU to roll back the favorable treatment it granted Ukrainian
hauliers after the war broke out — allowing them to take loads from Ukraine to
anywhere in the bloc with almost no formalities; the same rule applies to EU
companies taking goods to Ukraine.
European
Commissioner for Transport Adina Vălean | Pool photo by Francisco Seco via
Getty Images
Adamczyk
wants Vălean to study the possibility of reinstating international transport
permits for Ukrainian hauliers, and Poland plans to raise the issue at the
December 4 Transport Council.
But Monday
was Adamczyk's last day on the job. He was replaced as infrastructure minister
by Alvin Gajadhur in a Cabinet that is only expected to last for two weeks
before a new opposition-led government headed by former PM Donald Tusk takes
office.
Tusk
denounced the government's inability to resolve the issue.
"Since
they pretend to have formed a real government, they could pretend to deal with
real problems," he said on Tuesday.
Political opportunists
Instability
in Warsaw is opening the door to activists from Poland’s far-right
Confederation party.
“Ukrainians
used to carry out 160,000 trucking operations before the war. This year to date
it’s been nearly 1 million,” said Rafał Mekler, owner of a trucking company
from Międzyrzec Podlaski in eastern Poland.
But Mekler
isn’t simply a rank-and-file trucker. He's also a Confederation politician who
has been heavily involved in organizing the border protests. His Facebook page
is rife with criticism of Ukraine, and his party is Poland's most skeptical of
the alliance with Kyiv.
In one of
the posts, Mekler likened Ukraine to a “spoiled brat.”
“We are
fighting for our transport [business], not against Ukraine. But Ukraine has dug
its heels in and won’t budge an inch, giving us this emotional rhetoric about
the war and how we are blocking medicines from going through,” Mekler said.
Even though
the Polish protesters claim they are letting essential and military cargoes
pass, Derkach said that's very difficult in practice as he saw trucks carrying
fuel and humanitarian aid shipments unable to break through the logjam.
“They let
some 30 trucks a day pass the border. How can we even say they have the right
to do it? What is this, a siege of a war-torn country?” said Oleksiy Davydenko,
owner of a Ukrainian medical supply chain called Medtechnika.
Poland's
new Agriculture Minister Anna Gembicka said allegations that humanitarian and
military is being held up were "not true."
She blamed
the problems on the border on Russia's invasion and on the
"irresponsible" policy of the EU "which does not see the
problems of Poland and [other] border countries." She added she wants to
meet with Economy Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis to explain the Polish
viewpoint.
Kyiv says
two Ukrainian drivers have died while waiting; Polish police say one has.
So far the
Ukrainian government isn't backing down on its demand that the EU stick to the
deal last year that its drivers should be allowed in.
One of the
central bugbears for the Poles is that Ukraine uses an electronic tagging
system for all trucks queuing up at border crossings. The Poles want their
empty trucks exempted from that queuing scheme so they can pass through border
controls more quickly.
“We offered
[Polish truckers] to open more checkpoints and create special road lines for
the empty Polish trucks. But they do not want to register in an electronic
queue system like everyone else. It would be unfair to other countries if we
offer a special treatment,” Derkach said.
“We also
can’t return to the permits system as we lost all our other borders for our
export,” Derkach added, complaining that the Polish truckers were unwilling to
talk. “They didn’t want to listen to that we have to keep the economy running
during the war. Some of them said they already helped enough and now they had
to feed their families. So they just stood up and left the negotiations.”
Border policy
The
importance of Ukraine's border with Poland surged after Russia's invasion last
year, which cut off the country's easy access its Black Sea ports.
Initially,
Poland welcomed millions of refugees, led the way in supplying weapons to
Ukraine and backed its speedy admission to the EU.
But as the
costs of those policies rose, so did political tensions.
Poland,
along with Hungary and Slovakia, closed its market to Ukrainian grain imports,
despite an EU-Ukraine trade deal and in violation of the rules of the European
Union's single market.
Now it's
the turn of Polish truck drivers. Slovak and Hungarian truckers are threatening
similar protests. Ironically, Central European hauliers are making similar
grievances to West European trucking firms — which complained bitterly about
being undercut when those countries joined the EU.
The
truckers have been joined by farmers, who on Monday launched a 24-hour blockade
of the Medyka border crossing in southeastern Poland.
Ukrainians
“are biting the hand we have extended to them," farm protest organizer
Roman Kondrów told the Polish Press Agency.
The
protests have cost Ukraine's economy more than €400 million, Volodymyr Balin,
vice president of the Association of International Motor Carriers, said at a
briefing in Kyiv.
“I think
our mistake was to rely on Poland so much. We moved our businesses, we pay
taxes logistics fees we used to pay in Ukraine to Poland now. We thought we had
our backs covered,” Medtechnika’s Davydenko said. “Maybe if we were a bit more
cautious, we would not be dependent on Poland so much..”
Veronika
Melkozerova reported from Kyiv.
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