Why Poland–Ukraine ties strained sharply by 21 September 2023
A retrospective on a dispute over grain, weapons and a UN speech that unsettled relations between Kyiv and Warsaw.
What pushed Warsaw and Kyiv into open friction by 21 September 2023? The reports from the preceding days point to a convergence of a trade dispute, a diplomatic row and a domestic political scandal in Poland.
On 20 September 2023, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced that Poland would stop supplying Ukraine with weapons. The announcement came amid tension over Poland's import ban on Ukrainian agricultural products.
The same day, the Polish Foreign Ministry summoned Vasyl Zvarych, Ukrainian Ambassador to Poland, to convey a strong protest. The cause was a statement by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the United Nations General Assembly, in which he said that some European countries' actions indirectly help Russia. The remark drew condemnation from Poland.
A campaign backdrop
The quarrel unfolded during the run-up to the 2023 Polish parliamentary election. On 19 September 2023, documents allegedly from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs were reported to indicate that the Polish embassy in Minsk had issued 784,173 visas to people from 65 countries, with the aid of a Moscow-based company. People denied entry at the Belarus–European Union border during the border crisis may also have received visas.
What it meant
The sequence shows how quickly a commercial dispute over agricultural imports could spill into security cooperation and diplomacy. Poland's weapons announcement and the ambassador's summons came within the same day, and both followed Zelenskyy's remarks at the UN. The visa allegations, reported a day earlier, formed part of the political climate in Poland at that moment.
