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Snapshot Of Ukraine-Poland Ties As Elections Loom
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Warsaw, (APP – UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News – 12th Oct, 2023) Poland, which holds parliamentary elections on October 15, is a NATO member on the alliance‘s eastern flank — and one of Ukraine‘s most avowed supporters, sharing 530 kilometres (330 miles) of border with the country.
– Ukrainian diaspora –
Since Russia‘s full-scale aggression of Ukraine in February 2022, Poland, with a population of 38 million, has taken in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing the war.
According to the Polish Office for Foreigners, as of June 2023, over 974,000 Ukrainian refugees lived in Poland, half of them were children.
Women make up 78 percent of the adult population under protection.
But the overall number of Ukrainians with residence permits in Poland — including economic migrants — was over 1.4 million, meaning that 81 percent of all foreigners living in Poland were Ukrainian.
Statistics show that within the last nine years, the number of Ukrainians with valid residence permits in Poland has risen 35-fold.
– Refugee assistance –
According to the Polish Economic Institute, a government-affiliated think-tank, 70 percent of Polish people offered material support to the refugees from Ukraine within the first three months of the 2022 invasion.
The overall sum of both state and private aid provided in that period amounted to roughly one percent of Polish GDP.
According to the German-based Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine aid tracker, Polish government support until May 2023, including refugee costs, amounted to 3.2 percent of Poland‘s GDP, the most generous in percentage terms of all donors.
– Military support –
Poland is one of the major donors of military support to Ukraine.
According to the Kiel Institute, it pledged three billion Euros of military aid, which ranked Warsaw fourth — behind the United States, Germany and United Kingdom — in absolute spending on military aid to Kyiv.
Poland was first in the spring of 2022 to provide Ukraine with tanks, in the form of hundreds of Soviet-era vehicles, and this year sent some of its stocks of cutting-edge German-made Leopard 2 tanks.
It also urged the Western allies to send their vaunted battle tanks to Ukraine.
In March, Poland — as the first NATO member — pledged fighter jets to Ukraine and began deliveries of the Soviet-made MiG-29s in early April.
– History still divides –
Bilateral ties between Poland and Ukraine are still marked by history.
Discord over the Volhynia massacres between 1943 and 1945 has repeatedly led to diplomatic tensions.
In 2016, Poland‘s PiS-dominated parliament recognised the Volhynia massacres as a “genocide”, while Ukraine has stopped short of using the term, although it acknowledges the killing.
– Grain strains –
Poland has also sparred with Kyiv over grain imports, with the issue triggering a major diplomatic spat.
Poland has become a major transit route and export destination for Ukrainian grain since the Russian invasion began.
But Warsaw started barring imports after Polish farmers protested that a glut of Ukrainian grain was pushing down prices — and unilaterally extended the ban, prompting Kyiv to file a lawsuit against Poland at the World Trade Organization.
President Andrzej Duda has since compared Ukraine to a “drowning man” who could pull his rescuers into the water, while Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced Poland would stop transferring new weaponry to Kyiv.
As the rift escalated, Ukraine‘s leader Volodymyr Zelensky said some nations feigned solidarity with Kyiv, prompting Warsaw to denounce “unjustified” comments concerning Poland.