The queue of idle Russian lorries stretched back 20 miles from the border post, thwarted by a line of protesters decked out in yellow and blue.
While sanctions have brought much of the commerce between the European Union and Russia to a standstill, up to 1,500 vehicles carrying millions of pounds’ worth of food and other supplies have crossed daily from Poland to Belarus since the invasion began.
But yesterday they were stuck, blocked by a crowd singing along to Ukrainian pop music blasting from a stereo. “It’s about the principle,” said Oleh Yarovyi. “Either you have sanctions or you don’t.”
Yarovyi, 33, a Ukrainian who runs a chain of coffee shops in Poland, assembled 400 mostly Ukrainian demonstrators to choke off the crossing at Koroszczyn, on one of the biggest trade routes linking the EU to Russia.
Opposition MPs in Poland have called for a similar boycott, estimating that more than 22,000 lorries have entered Belarus since the start of the war.
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“We know that trade always brings money,” said Yarovyi, the organiser of Warsaw Euromaidan, an offshoot of the 2014 pro-EU protest movement in Ukraine. “In this situation, when there is an aggressor which is killing people and bombing towns, any kind of support for them is unhelpful.
“It’s actually very hard to determine what’s happening. You can have a Belarusian lorry, but it’s not clear where the goods are going and who is in charge.
“We don’t think these are sanctioned items, but you can have items that are being pulled apart into constituent elements and then reassembled as something else. We don’t know whether they are being used in the war effort.”
Poland insists that its customs officials are carrying out strict checks to ensure that the goods crossing the border have no dual-use capability, suitable for either civilian or military use.
However, Mateusz Morawiecki, 53, the prime minister, asked the EU yesterday to shut off all trade over land and sea. “The war is becoming even more devastating,” he said. “What counts now is what European leaders do next.”
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Natalia Panchenko, 33, another organiser of the border protest, said that the EU’s trade with Belarus, and therefore with Russia, was intimately tied to the trauma inflicted on her homeland.
“What is happening in Ukraine, it’s a war that none of us imagined would visit us in our homes,” she said. “Today they are killing my classmates that I went to school with, their children, our friends.
“They just go out to the shops and then the Russian army starts to shoot at them, or bombs started falling on them. So when these drivers complain that they can’t sleep in these conditions, I really don’t care.”
Over the weekend, as the tailback grew to more than 30 miles and there were skirmishes between drivers and protesters, police moved the lorries several miles away.
Panchenko said that during the last blockade she had received death threats in Russian. “The drivers and their wives were hunting me down on Facebook and saying they would chop my head off. It was crazy. But I don’t really care.”
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For Waclaw, 33, a property investor in Warsaw, the blockade has given him a sense of purpose. With friends he has led drives for volunteers and for taking in refugees. “I am ashamed that I am not back home, but by being here I feel like I can actually do something useful.
“I want them to listen to our call. I am personally insulted when I see these lorries crossing the border. I’m offended that the European Union isn’t doing anything when there are people dying.”
