Voorwaarden opheffen Pools veto EU-Rusland handelsakkoord (en)

Polish leaders have clarified that conditions remain if Warsaw is to lift its veto on EU-Russia treaty talks at an EU foreign ministers' meeting on 23 April, saying Russia must first back down on its meat embargo and the EU must give special energy guarantees.

"If Russia lifts the embargo and on top of this we get satisfactory terms in the area of energy in the [EU-Russia treaty negotiating] mandate, our reserve will be lifted," Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said in Warsaw on Wednesday (4 April), PAP reports.

"Whether or not this issue is realistically handled, depends on Russia's decision, for which we are waiting," he added, after Polish diplomats on Tuesday told EU colleagues they are happy to talk about the treaty mandate on 23 April under these terms.

The positive Polish signal has been welcomed as a breakthrough by the German EU presidency and the European Commission. A German foreign ministry spokesman called it an "important...first step." A commission spokesman called the Polish approach "constructive."

But Russia is still playing it cool. Putin aide Sergei Jastrzembski said "We have noted the signals coming from Brussels and Warsaw. Their content is not the same. We need some time to clarify the real positions of our partners," according to Interfax.

"When it comes to the signal from Warsaw, it begs the question if there are not too many 'ifs' that stand in the way of taking expected steps in the right direction," he added, with the clock ticking to the next EU-Russia summit in Samara on 18 May.

Poland imposed its veto on EU-Russia treaty talks last November, saying a €400 million a year Russian ban on Polish meat and vegetable exports was political and that the EU had not shown solidarity with its new, ex-Communist member states.

Both the Finnish and German EU presidencies have since taken up the issue with Russia's president Vladimir Putin, while the European Commission has bent over backwards to provide safety guarantees on Polish food to Moscow.

Brussels' latest dossier on Polish food, submitted last Friday, failed to impress Russia, however. "An early reading of the materials...indicates they are inadequate," Russian food safety chief Sergei Dankvert said on Monday, calling for fresh inspections.

The whole problem has had an air of artificiality about it for the past few month, however.

Polish food is finding its way into Russia via third countries and the €400 million a year loss figure cited by Warsaw is open to doubt. EU and Russian diplomats are still meeting regularly and talking about the same issues they will discuss once the "formal" EU-Russia treaty talks kick off.

It is unclear what energy provisions precisely Poland wants to put into the EU negotiating mandate. In the past, Poland had pushed for a legal mechanism that would allow any EU state to trigger suspension of the talks if Russia played dirty on trade.

Lithuania has also threatened to veto the EU-Russia talks unless Brussels gets Russia to play fair on an oil pipeline supplying its Mazeikiu petrol refinery. Russia shut down the pipe nine months ago in what Vilnius also sees as a political ploy.

So far, Russia has said it will produce a report "quite soon" on how long "technical repairs" of the pipeline might take. Some EU diplomats think it is unlikely that Lithuania - one of the smallest EU states - would pursue any veto on its own.