Polish carriers are blocking Ukrainian crossings, truck queues are as long as 28 kilometers

“The lines of trucks waiting at the Dorohusk border crossing end in the village of Janów, which is located 28 kilometers from Dorohusk,” Chelmsk police spokeswoman Ewa Czyžová told PAP in the afternoon. “And they keep growing,” she added.

Trucks waiting at the Hrebenne border crossing have to wait around 90 hours because there are around 900 heavy vehicles in the convoy, the customs administration in Lublin said. The column before the Hrebenne crossing reaches the town of Zatyle, which is approximately 13 kilometers from the border.

Protesters let one truck per hour from Ukraine into Poland and three or more trucks from Poland into Ukraine. “Trucks carrying humanitarian aid, food and fuel are no longer exempt from the blockade,” Czyžová said. “These vehicles also have to wait in a queue,” she added. Buses can cross the border without delay.

Polish truckers, who started the protest on Monday, are demanding the re-introduction of mandatory permits for truckers from Ukraine, except for those carrying humanitarian and military aid. At the same time, the number of licenses should be limited to the state before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

According to Reuters, carriers also complain that companies from Russia or Belarus are setting up companies in Poland. Their demands also include a ban on the operation of transport companies with capital in countries outside the European Union.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said on Monday that, according to Kyiv, blocking the borders harms the interests and economies of both countries. “It also affects the functioning of solidarity routes, which were intended to export Ukrainian agricultural products,” he added.

The so-called solidarity routes are alternative logistics routes enabled by the EU to support the export of Ukrainian products disrupted by the Russian invasion of the country and Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports. At the same time, Polish-Ukrainian trade relations have been complicated in recent months by the dispute over the import of Ukrainian grain and other agricultural products.