More than 20,000 vehicles were blocked on Thursday at the border between Ukraine and Poland, which Polish truckers have been paralyzing since the beginning of the week to denounce "unfair" competition from their neighbors, the Ukrainian Ministry of Reconstruction announced. Dozens of Polish transport companies began blocking three crossing points between the two countries on Monday. In particular, they are calling for the restoration of entry permits for their Ukrainian competitors, in order to reduce their numbers.
Queues have only grown over the course of the week and 20,000 vehicles are now "blocked on both sides" of the border, according to Ukraine's Ministry of Reconstruction. This harms the Ukrainian and Polish economies but also those of "other countries" that would like to transport goods, he said. Ukraine said it "respects the right to demonstrate" but said it was "ready for constructive dialogue to resolve the situation".
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"It's not normal to close the border"
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Traffic on the Ukrainian-Polish border remains complicated" for trucks and is getting worse "every day," Andriy Demchenko, spokesman for the border guards, said earlier. At the Hrebenne crossing in Poland, one of the three blocked, "the queue is about 40 kilometers long," according to Malgorzata Pawlowska, a spokeswoman for the local police. "The waiting time to cross the border crossing is about 160 hours," she said. At the Rava-Ruska border crossing in western Ukraine, some Ukrainian truckers said they had been waiting for several days.
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We've been waiting for a very long time," said Dmitro, who said he arrived four days ago and had run out of food and water. Oleksander, 36, described difficult conditions: "You see, there's a ditch and a field, no toilets, nothing," he said, saying he had been blocked for two days. "It's not normal to close the border with Ukraine during the war. It's just economic pressure on Ukraine," he said.
Polish organisers have indicated that they will be able to continue their action "in the long term, at least until the end of the year", according to Andriy Demchenko, who specified that buses and cars could circulate on the other hand. The incident marks a new snag in relations between Kiev and Warsaw, which have been strained in recent months due in part to the disagreement over the export of Ukrainian grain to Europe via Poland. The country, which has welcomed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing the war, has been one of the largest donors of military aid to Ukraine for more than a year and a half.