Grain: ‘Ungrateful’, Ukraine complaints against Poland, others in WTO

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: Although the West and its allies are still helping Ukraine with funds and arms in its war against Russia, the war-torn victim nation is now earning the wrath of those helping it as an ‘ungrateful’ country.

In particular, Poland, which has sheltered over 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees, is both angry and embarrassed. This Ukrainian influx hiked by 50 percent of the population of Rzeszów, the largest city in south-eastern Poland. Warsaw’s population has also increased by 15 percent, Kraków’s by 23 percent, and Gdansk’s by 34 percent, according to the media reports.

Poland’s ties with Ukraine have slumped to their lowest point since February 2022 when Russia invaded its neighbour.

“Ukraine is behaving like a drowning person clinging to everything it can…but we have the right to defend ourselves against harm being done to us,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told reporters on Tuesday in New York, where he was attending the UN General Assembly.

While Ukraine has moved the World Trade Organization (WTO) against its neighbors, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia banned some Ukrainian agricultural goods after the European Union recently decided to lift such restrictions, the media reported on Friday.

In particular, a bitter Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced that his country will soon stop sending arms to Ukraine. He made the comment as his populist party faces pressure from the rival party in a national election due on October 15. The far-right party, Confederation, says Poland is not getting the gratitude it deserves for arming Ukraine and accepting its refugees.

Poland will now only provide supplies of ammunition and armaments that had previously been agreed to. “A series of absolutely unacceptable statements and diplomatic gestures appeared on the Ukrainian side.”

“The message is very bad, both for Poland’s reputation but also because it’s being one of the chief advocates of military aid to Ukraine,” reports from Warsaw said.

Emotions ran high after Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia last week announced a new ban on Ukrainian grain imports, saying they wanted to protect their own farmers from a glut of Ukrainian grain in their markets.  The Ukrainian grain lowers prices for local farmers and hurts their livelihood.

Kyiv responded with a complaint at the WTO against the three countries that sparked even more angry reactions from Poland.

At the United Nations on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alleged that the countries opposing Ukraine on grain were in fact working on Russia’s behalf. Protesting against it, Poland urgently summoned the Ukrainian ambassador to complain on Wednesday.

Poland, on NATO’s eastern flank, has so far been a staunch supporter of Ukraine, sending weapons and humanitarian aid and opening its borders to refugees.

The Polish Deputy Foreign Minister, Pawel Jablonski, on Wednesday “strongly protested” Zelenskyy’s comments.

Poland’s ruling party, Law and Justice, is fighting for the votes of farmers, many of whom are upset that Ukraine’s food products have flooded the local market, pushing prices down and hurting their livelihoods.

The growing tensions highlight the risks Ukraine faces in maintaining Western support as its fight against Russia drags on.

The rift also shows how Ukraine and its neighbors are competing agricultural powers and how the European defense of domestic farmers could complicate Kyiv’s hopes for a future path into the EU.

Ukraine — a major global supplier of wheat, barley, corn, and vegetable oil — has struggled since Russia’s invasion to get its food products to parts of the world struggling with hunger.

“I am warning the Ukrainian authorities because if they escalate the conflict in this way, we will add more products to the ban on imports into Poland,” Morawiecki said Wednesday on Polsat News.

He argued that Ukrainian officials do not seem to understand how Poland’s agricultural market has been destabilized by the war.

In Bulgaria, the pro-Russia Socialist party has submitted a proposal to parliament to ban foods from Ukraine. So far, the government is just halting the import of sunflower seeds until a quota is agreed with Kyiv.

Prime Minister Nikolai Denkov announced the measure late Tuesday after lengthy talks with farmers who launched a nationwide protest last week over parliament’s decision to lift a ban on Ukrainian imports, citing higher food prices.