Poland will call for the EU to sanction Russian agricultural products entering the bloc, Warsaw’s envoy to Brussels said in remarks published on Saturday.
“We believe that sanctions on Russian agricultural products should be imposed immediately,” said Andrzej Sadoś, the Polish permanent representative to the EU, according to the Polish Press Agency.
The EU has imposed 10 rounds of sanctions against Moscow for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but hasn’t touched farm products because of the threat to food security, particularly in Africa.
EU diplomats are slated to discuss an 11th round of sanctions against Russia next week.
The call by Sadoś for unprecedented sanctions on food products comes just after Warsaw broke with Kyiv to call for limits on Ukrainian grain coming into Poland and other EU countries.
With Polish farmers suffering from sagging prices, the European Commission in late April struck an agreement in principle with Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia to allow the transit of Ukrainian grain across their countries without any of it entering their domestic markets. Within a week, however, that agreement was already falling apart.
Sadoś made a direct reference to the Ukrainian grain dustup in his call for sanctions on Russian farm products. While Western governments have typically refrained from blocking the sale of foodstuffs, especially amid a global hunger crisis, Europe isn’t facing that issue, Sadoś said.
“Quite the opposite,” he continued. “We have a surplus problem” related to the Ukrainian imports.