Polish PM Appeals for Total EU Ban on Trade with Russia

Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland's prime minister, has urged tougher sanctions on Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine and called on the European Union to impose a total ban on trade with Russia.

"Poland is proposing to add a trade blockade to this package of sanctions as soon as possible, both for seaports - a ban on entering Russian-flagged ships with Russian goods - but also a ban on land trade," Morawiecki told a press conference during his visit to Telesystem-Mesko, Poland's ammunition and rockets R&D centre in Lubiczow near Warsaw.

In his opinion, such a step "will additionally force Russia to consider whether it would be better to stop this cruel war".

Morawiecki added that "the matter concerns the life and death of tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, it concerns a sovereign country - Ukraine - but also Nato security."

"We must show our strength and determination towards Russia, otherwise we will have to pay a higher price in the near future," he said.

During his address at the Telesystem-Mesko centre, Morawiecki also said that money is needed to wage war, and with this in mind, Poland regularly transfers increasingly more funds to modernise the Polish army.

He said that that in the coming years this would be continued "in an unprecedented dimension."

Morawiecki pointed out that at the European Council forum he had proposed that defence spending should be "taken out of the brackets of all European regulations concerning debt, deficit and stabilisation expenditure rules".

"Either there is security, or we are all blackmailed, as by Russia today," he said.

Morawiecki added that Poland wants "to be well prepared for all possible future bad scenarios."

"Our domestic technologies, allocating more resources, are to serve this purpose.