The Polish government does not intend to close the border to goods from Ukraine and completely abandon the European Union’s Green Deal, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters.
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Tusk is scheduled to meet with farmers’ representatives on Saturday. He previously stated that the issue of completely closing the border with Ukraine for the movement of goods is being considered.
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“I do not hide and can repeat that postulates that sound like “Away with the Green Deal, block Ukraine” are impossible for me. I want to talk about how to successfully change the records of the Green Deal so that the Polish farmer does not feel disadvantaged, and how regulate trade with Ukraine in order to successfully protect Polish producers from unequal competition,” Tusk said.
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He noted that he does not intend to take only symbolic steps.
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“And on Saturday I will tell representatives of farmers that symbolic actions, for example, closing the border with Ukraine for a few days, are not important to me,” the Polish prime minister said.
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“If someone wants to protest, that’s their right. Just don’t break the rules, as some demonstrators did yesterday,” he concluded.
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During Wednesday’s farmers’ street protest, protesters were uncharacteristically aggressive. Near the Prime Minister’s Office building, protesters provoked clashes with police, set fire to tires and threw burning objects towards the building. Near the Sejm building, they dismantled the cobblestone sidewalk and threw stones at the police, several police officers were injured.
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Farmer protests have been taking place in Poland since the beginning of February. The main demands of the protesters are to stop the import of agricultural products from Ukraine to Poland and abandon the environmental plans of the European Union (the so-called Green Deal), which involves achieving zero emissions into the atmosphere by 2050.