Why are the Poles' demands at the border meaningless? What does corruption have to do with this?

On November 27, the Poles began blocking the Shegini checkpoint around the clock. The three largest checkpoints: “Korcheva - Krakovets”, “Hrebenne - Rava-Russkaya”, “Dorogusk - Yagodin” have been blocked by Polish carriers since November 6, allowing several trucks through per hour.

According to preliminary estimates of the Federation of Employers of Ukraine alone, direct losses to the Ukrainian economy from blocking a number of checkpoints on the Polish-Ukrainian border already amount to more than 500 million euros. If we count indirect losses, they are measured in billions of euros. Fines against Ukrainian carriers for failure to comply with contractual obligations, refusal to conclude contracts with carriers and exporters-importers for the New Year are the next “happiness” for private business in Ukraine.

The following goods are mainly exported across the Polish border by road: sugar, vegetable fats and oils (soybean, sunflower), corn, rapeseed, confectionery, and dairy products. Mostly imported: vegetables, meat (chicken, pork), berries, dairy products.

Why the government is still making it so that in Ukraine business is better at exporting grain than producing “meat (chicken, pork), flour and dairy products” from it is a separate story for research. Or before the change of this government?

You can study for a long time how routes for drivers are changing, how prices for imported goods (fuel, for example) will change, you can also certainly find the dirty traces of our northern neighbor, who is just looking for where to mess with the Ukrainians. Or we can discuss the internal reasons that led to the current situation at the border. Only in order to really evaluate the actions of our and Polish authorities. Before and during the border conflict. There is a lot to explore. For specialists, the failure or systemic (corruption) in relations with private transport from the Ukrainian authorities is more than obvious. I'll try to prove it.

First, 3 significant notes on the topic:

With the closure of our ports, almost all maritime cargo flows literally rushed to land borders. In the best previous years, 4 container ports of Ukraine loaded about 600 thousand units of containers per year abroad alone. Now this is perhaps the same number of container trucks alone at the land border, in addition to what was already there before. Although the war slightly reduced the need for imports, it also added exports (grain, oil, etc.). According to various estimates, at least 500 thousand annual shipments have been added.

What is the point of discussing the previous 180 thousand annual permits for Ukrainian drivers, according to the requirements of the Polish side, when 4-5 times more are already needed!
And these are not tilt vehicles, but container ships, that is, completely different rolling stock and drivers! Whether the Poles have this in the required quantity to compete with the Ukrainians, who have an additional 500 thousand shipments, still needs to be clarified. We simply removed some of the vehicles that transported containers inside Ukraine to ports and delivered them to Poland, Romania, etc. (those trucks that meet EU standards) Can the Poles do this? No! Apparently, in a few years they will be able to.

Truck downtime due to government formalities and bribes at the border. This is a topic in which Ukrainian business has completely lost to the state and there is not even a hint that the situation may change. Just a year ago, at the Romanian and Polish borders, 2-3 weeks of waiting in line for truckers was considered the norm. Are these weeks on the Polish border no longer the norm? This is a custom, an everyday practice.

There is not a single government agency in Ukraine that monitors the speed of registration and regulates queues depending on the number of possible registrations at a certain time. Despite the fact that it is the speed of clearance and the introduction of temporary standards for the work of officials that is the basis for eradicating extortions at customs and among border guards (this is a very common way of inducing a small bribe for quick clearance).

Ukraine already has experience of living with blocked highways of national importance. For many years. Moreover, since the time of the power of the Yanukovych organized crime group. Since 2015, I have been writing about how homeless people blocked one of the entrances to the Odessa port, and neither the courts, nor criminal cases, nor the “decisive” actions of the police, nor the fines of the Antimonopoly Committee made it possible to unblock that passage to the port. In winter and summer, for almost 10 years, homeless people stood on the highway 24/7, not allowing cars into the port.

Only through payment to a private company with management from Moscow. At least 1,000 cars drove to the port at this extra cost per day, the latest tariff was $16 per car, $16 thousand cash per day, and then you don’t have to count.

Enough to pay homeless protesters, judges and police. It was even enough that in the latest decisions of the Antimonopoly Committee, the “head of the President” Madame Peschanskaya decided that the blocked route is not a passage to the port, but a kind of passage to the toilet near the port. Moreover, the toilet itself costs the driver 50 cents, and travel to the toilet costs 15.5 dollars. The topic was closed only with the beginning of the war and the “evacuation” of the Moscow leadership as a “fruitful topic” with a cache away from Ukraine. So, the current road closure on the Polish border is a complete copy of the Odessa theme of road closure.

Our government and the Muscovites created an example, and now the Poles are completely copying these actions! Naturally, with complete inaction of the state of Ukraine itself. As then, so now. There is experience, it is being applied. Poles at the border are now using useful experience on how not to react to the protests of the decade, how to successfully fight off businesses that are idle and do not want to pay a bribe just for travel to their place of work.

From the demands of the Poles who blocked the road to Ukrainian “long-range drivers”:

- access to the eCherga portal in one way or another,
- access to the Shlyakh portal in one way or another,
- equalize the number of transportation permits for the parties.
In order:

“eCherga” is a conditionally legal state portal that “manages” the queue of truckers at customs land posts. According to this portal, for example, at the time of writing (11/29/2023), queues at the border of Ukraine, except Poland:

Starokazache (to Moldova) - Estimated waiting time 6 days 13 hours 44 minutes. Car in queue 381. The queue is delayed.
Reni (to Romania) - Estimated waiting time 13 days 24 minutes. Car in queue 589. The queue is delayed. And this is not Poland! 2 weeks of waiting not at the Polish border.
I ask the driver: “Is it better with ECherga?” - "Certainly! I used to be a fool in the queue for weeks, but now I wait at home for 2-3 weeks and only get to the queue at the deadline in Echerga. »

That is, our helmsmen are “smart guys”, instead of hitting the queues: analyzing the reasons for downtime at each checkpoint, improving document flow and speeding up movement through checkpoints, they simply made an electronic queue of downtime “at home”. To be frank, this is a complete failure of transport and logistics policy in Ukraine! Instead of speeding up the movement of transport and improving logistics, the authorities did not remove the queues, but moved the queues further away from the problem and pretended that this was an “achievement”.

The Poles demand to be included in the eCherga. Do they think that they will stand, like our drivers, in their homes and in Echerga? No! Houses of Poles in Poland. They will stand in a general queue on the highway or at gas stations. This is not a solution to the problem for them at all. The solution to the problem is to make sure there are no queues. And not to remove the queues “out of sight”.

The Poles demand that empty cars be allowed in without any queues at all. There is a queue outside the system. Is this a problem for our government that has no solution? Assign specific transition points, prescribe the process so that an empty car is processed in 15 minutes and no more, and go to the Poles: Done. No, they are evacuating drivers from downtime. But the problem is that our customs officers will immediately begin to “trade the new queue” and allow those with cargo into the queue for empty cars. Well, in a month or two you will solve this problem too. But this again is your problem, statists, so decide, at least something!

Next, the state system “Ways”, to which the Poles are trying to have access. I have personal experience of using it. A very inconvenient interface, but in matters that the Poles hope for in this system, they will be even more disappointed! The fact is that the system is based on the legal responsibility of the head of the enterprise, the enterprise itself, for the fact that the driver for some reason decided to stay abroad. But purely legally, this is absolutely wrong.

The obligation to the state to return back to the country is borne only personally by the citizen who leaves. And not the one who sends him on a business trip abroad for official purposes. But in the Shlyakh system it’s different. The Poles apparently don’t know about this. As a result, we have the following scheme: border guards, SBU, SSBT, police, and others, having access to the “Road”, can decide at their own discretion how to “close the drivers’ cases.” They understand perfectly well how they usually decide in business. Only officially we have the following numbers:

Could it have been easier to initiate just one criminal case against those who created a state system that generated 607 criminal cases in a year? There are thousands of investigators, prosecutors, judges, and so on in cases. Only from one “smart” e-platform. How many cases were “solved”? Five or 10 times more?

No one knows how many evaders actually left under the guise of drivers. Nobody knows how much cash was pumped to officials of all bodies for “conducting business in Shlyakh”. It doesn’t matter whether the driver had an accident abroad and cannot return during the investigation, or has found a new family and does not want to return. They punish the manager of the enterprise with a cache and can deny access to the Shlyakh system to the entire enterprise. If there is no cache, the enterprise will be stopped completely.

The Polish protesters do not yet know what they are demanding. For some mistake in the Shlyakh system, they will quickly be banned from entering Ukraine (not just one truck, but all of them from this enterprise). It’s easier for ours, they know “our system”, they know who to call, who to enter. The main thing is to have something to bring.

However, there are still some numbers about the scale of this e-scam:

Indeed, in the story with “Shlyakh” we observe a typical e-system of cash earnings exclusively for officials: border guards detect, law enforcement agencies react, that is, they “remove the cache.” Some insignificant part of the violations will remain for statistics and will be shown officially, several hundred enterprises will break down, the rest of the underwater part of the iceberg will remain in the pockets of officials.

Isn’t it clear that the system was developed exactly this way, to enable officials to earn an impressive cash through official work? This is already a distinctive feature of Ukrainian e-systems.

Thus, neither eCherga nor “Shlyakh” will help the Poles in any way. Why do they want them? Because they see that Ukrainians are forced to use these systems, but they do not know how much, in addition to these official systems, participants will have to pay just “for participation,” and they naively believe that this Ukrainian state system is legally legal. But this is not so.

Permits and ECMT. Also by. Most of the added work to Poland with our exports and imports is container shipping. But in order to carry a certain sea container for export, the driver must receive it empty somewhere. Now they receive it in Odessa, Ternopil and several other sites for empty containers.

A driver from a Ukrainian company will calmly travel 200-300 km to pick up an empty container, another 200-300 km to deliver it for loading, and set off on a voyage to a Polish or German seaport on the Baltic. And the Pole will have to drive a completely empty car already about 1000 km (to Odessa - 2000 km) to the required site for empty containers in Ukraine, then drive with the empty container for cargo and only then go to the Baltic port with the cargo in the container.

Logistics in container shipping for the Poles does not work at all. Why then would they demand equal rights in our transportation, when the Poles cannot economically handle such logistics? Of course, we must add that the distribution of these papers, which the Poles so need, in our country has always been associated with terrible corruption. But this will be a separate topic.

And finally.

Who was sent to resolve the conflict on the Ukrainian side from the transport workers? Deputy Minister Derkach Sergey. With 15 years of experience as an investigator in the Zhytomyr region. “Is an expert in anti-corruption investigations and prosecution of corruption”... Without transport education, without experience in working with transport. This is what is written on the Ministry’s website. But for almost a year of work in this Ministry, such a specialist has not heard anything at all about any fight against corruption in this particular Ministry. Quite the contrary. So far the result is ZERO!

So perhaps the authorities need to start with themselves? Determine a plan for changes in all these corrupt e-portals, invite the Poles, explain to them how we will change the conditions to fair and normal ones for both our drivers and Polish ones.

Perhaps this is where we need to start, and then the position before Poland, the EU and those who will further deal with this problem will be 100% clear to everyone and advantageous for Ukraine. Without an action plan, it is impossible for us to reach a plan for honest negotiations with Polish protesters. But... when we ourselves are in deep trouble, what can we ask the Poles for?

This is how Ukrainians, Poles and most of all ordinary drivers suffer from the systemic corruption of the Ukrainian authorities.

Start with yourself!

In short, the one who drew up the requirements for the Poles to block the routes “lost it.” These requirements do not solve anything in real work. But, if the government continues to embed corruption into e-services, then the paid protests will only be increasingly provoked by our government itself. Unfortunately, the authorities are not at all interested in such an understanding of the situation, as I propose. How can they earn cash on e-platforms and in queues?

“Black money in queues” is already a distinctive feature of Ukrainian government corruption in transport. It’s worse that this feature is not seen in Europe, they are not included in the requirements, the conditions for change, for receiving money for reforms and restoration. Why can’t Europe say: “Yes, here in Ukraine, not only on the Polish border, cars stand in queues for several weeks, and this provokes corruption. Put things in order at home, and then ask for help at the Polish border.”