Minsk/Kiev - Wildcat strikes by Polish customs workers brought to a halt thousands of lorries and automobiles at Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian border checkpoints, officials in Minsk and Kiev said Friday. Motorists were stranded in lengthening queues in both directions at the Varshavsky Most and Domachevo crossing sites, a pair of heavily-used road transit points on the Polish-Belarusian border, said Belarus customs spokesman Aleksander Tishchenko.
"The Polish customs workers are only admitting vehicles with diplomatic license plates," Tishchenko said, according to a Belapan news agency report. "Otherwise nothing is getting through."
Due to the shutdown of the two highway checkpoints, hundreds of long-distance lorries moving goods westward were for practical purposes trapped in Belarus, he said.
Road and rail traffic in neighbouring Ukraine also was affected by a localised strike, Ukrainian officials said, citing a Warsaw government warning on Friday that Polish customs officials would not process goods moving between Ukraine and Poland at three key rail checkpoints.
More than 1,500 rail cars already were logjammed on the Ukrainian side of the border, most loaded with ore, coal, and metal, according to a statement by the Ukrainian national customs service.
Automobile traffic jams extending more than a kilometre were reported at the Kravovets-Korchova, Rava-Ruska-Hrebenne, and Shegini- Medyka crossing points between Ukraine and Poland.
Polish border workers were processing drivers and their vehicles at a snail's pace, forcing waits of three or more hours on motorists, and halting commercial lorries entirely, witnesses said.
The Polish side of the Shegini-Medyka checkpoint, along the Warsaw-Kiev highway, was only passing through 27 vehicles an hour, a massive slowdown given the several hundred cars and lorries which normally pass through each hour, an official from Ukraine's Lviv border troops command said.
Ukraine would provide tent housing, medical services, and bathroom facilities to the hundreds of drivers stuck at the Polish border for days, according to a border troops announcement.
Similar delays were reported by Russian officials in the city- province Kaliningrad.
"They (Polish customs officers) have declared a protest without any deadline for ending it," said Elena Siniavskaya, a Kaliningrad- based Russia border troops spokeswoman.
"The customs workers are upset over poor working conditions," she said, according to an Interfax news agency report.
Only one Polish customs worker was on duty for entrance processing, and another for exit processing, at the usually heavily- trafficked Bagrationovsk-Bezledy crossing point between Poland and Kaliningrad province, Siniavskaya said.
Other sectors of the Polish-Kaliningrad frontier were shut down completely to all traffic, with the exception of a few international passenger trains, she said.
Poland as of the beginning of 2008 became an active member of the Shengen treaty group, obliging Warsaw to enforce strict European Union admission standards on all of Poland's non-EU borders.
Polish border officials prior to the change warned of insufficient government funding needed to control the massive flow of traffic between Poland and its eastern neighbours Belarus and Ukraine, and threatened collective action to force Warsaw to provide resources.
The work stoppages are part of an effort by the Polish customs officials to improve their working conditions, the Interfax news agency reported.
