Ukraine, Poland bans the import of grain from Kiev: “We must defend the interests of our citizens”

«Friends and allies of Kiev», yes. “But we have to defend the interests of our citizens.” With these words, Jaroslaw Kaczynski – the Polish leader of the ruling “Law and Justice” party in which Prime Minister Mateusz Morawieck is also a militant – announced Warsaw’s stop “on the import of agricultural and food products from Ukraine”. This decision came after days of tension in the country (and also within the executive): the arrival of cheap wheat and the consequent price crisis has in fact triggered widespread protests in Poland, forcing last April 6, Agriculture Minister Henryk Kowalczyk resigned. But that’s not all: in the past few hours in some towns on the border with Ukraine, several demonstrators have blocked trains carrying grain to the European Union. “It is the duty of every authority, every good authority, to protect the interests of its citizens,” Kaczynski reiterated during an election rally in Lyse, an agricultural municipality in the north of the country. The stop announced today, Saturday 15 April, by Poland is not an isolated decision: other Eastern countries, such as Hungary, Slovakia, but also Romania and Bulgaria have in fact already asked the Commission for an intervention to protect the entire agricultural sector. The new Minister of Agriculture, Robert Telus, also spoke on the issue, underlining how the announcement made by the president of the Pis party represents a “signal to the European Union that it should create the right tools to distribute Ukrainian agricultural products among all the countries of Europe and not only those bordering on Ukraine».

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