Poland’s new Prime Minister Donald Tusk said while on a visit to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on January 22 that Poland was ready to work on fixing differences between the two neighbours and focus entirely on defeating Russia.

The trip to Ukraine was Tusk’s second foreign visit since his swearing-in as PM in mid-December. Poland and Ukraine, while close allies since Russia’s attack on the latter in February 2022, have not avoided bitter fights, especially over agriculture and transport.

Tusk said that Poland and Ukraine “reached a common understanding” on recent protests of Polish truckers and farmers that blocked the Polish-Ukrainian border for weeks.

Polish truckers say that cheap Ukrainian competition is undermining their businesses that have to meet stringent EU labour regulations, which the Ukrainians do not have to observe. 

Polish farmers, in turn, have long complained about uncontrolled imports of Ukrainian farm products into Poland that drive local prices down. Poland recently reached an agreement with the European Commission on controlling the inflow of Ukrainian farm products. 

“We will be looking at how we can provide additional assurances to Poland and other member states and one way of doing this is introducing country-specific safeguards,” the EU’s Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis told the Financial Times this week. Dombrovskis admitted that Ukrainian farm imports disrupt eastern EU markets more than others.

Polish truckers also suspended their protest at the Polish-Ukrainian border crossings last week following the signing of an agreement with the Polish government that promised tighter control of Ukrainian trucking companies entering Poland. Ukraine agreed to test-suspend its controversial e-queue system at one of the crossings.

Polish truckers say that the EU-Ukraine agreement liberalising rules for Ukrainian transport companies should be revised.

Protests at the border became a problem in relations between Warsaw and Kyiv as well as a flashpoint between Poland and the EU since trade policy is the latter’s competence not an individual member state’s. 

Tusk said in Kyiv that discussing openly the political and economic differences between the two countries will help Ukraine’s war effort, which the PM said Poland would do its best to support.

“Poland will do everything to increase Ukraine's chances of victory in this war," Tusk told a press conference held with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, as quoted by Reuters.

Tusk's comments on Hungary's stance against helping Ukraine provoked a furious response from Budapest, underlining the deterioration in Hungarian-Polish relations since, first, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and now, the recent change of government there.

In that vein, Tusk hinted at joint Polish-Ukrainian investments in the production of weapons and ammunition.

“The coming months and years will be a military and logistical challenge for the entire free world. It cannot be that Russia will have a clear advantage in terms of weapons and ammunition, because then we will all lose," Tusk said.

The Polish PM also met his Ukrainian counterpart Denis Shmyhal to discuss a project to build a highway extending the Polish A4 highway from the border to Rivne via Lviv.