Polish truckers to lift border blockade with Ukraine

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Polish truckers have agreed to suspend a border blockade with Ukraine that was hurting Kyiv’s trade and war efforts and casting a shadow over Donald Tusk’s premiership. 

Poland’s infrastructure minister Dariusz Klimczak on Tuesday said he had struck a deal with the hauliers to suspend their protest against cheap competition from Ukrainian drivers.

The truckers will stop their blockade on Wednesday while they hold further negotiations with the ministry in order to reach a final deal by March 1. Klimczak told a news conference that the aim was “to implement everything requested by the hauliers”. The minister also called on the Ukrainian authorities to help control cross-border traffic and ensure that “Poland is a window to the world for Ukraine”.

The border blockade had hobbled Tusk’s early efforts to improve relations with Ukraine after taking office last month. The prime minister said last week that he wanted to give full support to Ukraine’s war against Russia, but not at the expense of Polish economic interests and in particular the hauliers and farmers who had been suffering from cheaper and unregulated competition from neighbouring Ukraine. 

Tusk was expected to make a long-awaited visit to Kyiv in the coming days. He said this month that his trip would be facilitated once the blockade ended, because “our arguments will be better heard when Poland is not a country blocking borders”.

Officials gave few details about Tuesday’s deal, but Poland’s infrastructure minister pledged to tighten controls on the paperwork of Ukrainian truckers, rather than return to an EU permit system that was abolished in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The protesters also want authorities to stop Ukrainian trucks from making unauthorised trips within the EU to transport goods, a practice known as cabotage.

The Polish government said it would negotiate with Kyiv to make changes to its electronic border check system, which Polish drivers claimed had given preferential treatment to Ukrainian drivers and also left some Polish trucks waiting for days to return home.  

Poland’s truckers started protesting on November 6, blockading cargo traffic in and out of Ukraine and forcing Ukrainian drivers to wait for days in freezing temperatures on both sides of the border, except for military and humanitarian supplies. Polish drivers have blamed waiting lines on the Ukrainian side on the Ukrainians taking retaliatory measures.

The Polish drivers warned that they would return to the border crossings if the infrastructure ministry failed to fulfil its pledges. “We are giving the ministry a mandate of trust. This is not a capitulation, but a strategic pause,” said Rafał Mekler, leader of the Polish Carriers Protest and an activist of the Confederation party, on social media platform X.

Farmers joined the border protests late last year, after having prompted a unilateral import ban on cheaper Ukrainian grain in the spring, in violation of the EU’s common trade policy. Joining forces with the truckers was a way to keep up pressure on the new government to maintain the ban and even expand it to other farm products from Ukraine.

Tusk has defended the grain ban since taking power, maintaining the protectionist stance of the previous administration. The new government is also opposed to a broader EU free-trade deal that the European Commission was set to extend until 2025. The EU’s removal of quotas and duties on Ukrainian products was initially agreed in June 2022, as a way to support the war-torn country.