Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced that the country will stop supplying weapons to Ukraine after Kyiv filed lawsuits over grain bans.
The situation comes as Warsaw is one of Ukraine's staunchest allies amid its continuing conflict against Russia. Morawiecki said Poland will instead focus on arming itself with more modern weapons.
Poland To End Supply of Weapons to Ukraine
On Tuesday, Poland summoned Ukraine's ambassador over comments that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made at the United Nations. The latter argued that some countries feigned solidarity with his nation, which is a statement that Warsaw denounced as "unjustified concerning Poland, which has supported Ukraine since the first days of the war."
The Polish prime minister announced the decision during a televised address on Wednesday following rapidly escalating tensions between the two nations over grain imports. He said that they would no longer be transferring weapons to Kyiv.
The grain row between the two nations began after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine all but closed the main Black Sea shipping lanes. According to BBC, this forced Kyiv to find alternative overland routes to deliver its grain products.
That situation resulted in large quantities of grain ending up in central Europe. The European Union then temporarily banned grain imports into five countries: Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia.
That decision was made to protect local farmers who feared that Ukrainian grain was lowering the product's prices locally. The ban ended on Sept. 15, and the EU decided not to renew it, but some nations, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, decided to continue implementing the ban.
However, the European Commission repeatedly warned that it was not up to individual EU members to make trade policy for the bloc. Ukraine filed lawsuits earlier this week to the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the countries that decided to continue the implementation of the ban, which it said was a violation of international obligations.
Dispute Over Grain Bans
Polish leaders have compared Ukraine to a drowning person who was hurting the one trying to help and have threatened to expand a ban on food products from Kyiv. On the other hand, the war-torn country's president suggested that EU allies prohibiting imports of his nation's grains were only helping Russia, according to the Associated Press.
During the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Zelensky noted that some European nations play out solidarity in a political theater. He said that these countries are simply helping set the stage for a Moscow actor.
In response to Ukraine's complaint to the WTO, Poland's foreign minister said that putting pressure on it in multilateral forums or sending complaints to international courts are inappropriate methods of resolving the differences between the nations, said The Guardian.
A Ukraine analyst from a Polish state-funded think tank, Tadeusz Iwanski, said that Ukraine has been pursuing hyper-assertive diplomacy since the beginning of the war with Russia. He noted that this was partly due to which its requests and demands have been granted.
