Home › Politics › Lukashenko's three-way alliance idea and Poland's grain call
Lukashenko's three-way alliance idea and Poland's grain call
Summary
A look back at two regional political moves reported around 15 September 2023, in Sochi and in Warsaw.
What did the leaders of Belarus and Poland want from their neighbours on 15 September 2023? In Sochi, Russia, Belarus's president, Alexander Lukashenko, met Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and proposed a three-way alliance between Belarus, Russia and North Korea. The proposal came in the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which was then in its second year.
Two days earlier, on 13 September 2023, Poland's prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, had called on the European Union to extend an embargo on imports of Ukrainian corn, wheat, sunflower and rapeseed.
The two items came from different directions. One was a proposal for closer alignment among Minsk, Moscow and Pyongyang, made at a face-to-face meeting. The other was a request from a government in the EU to keep restrictions on agricultural goods from Ukraine.
Taken together, they show how the regional politics around the war extended beyond the battlefield in mid-September 2023: into diplomacy among states aligned against Kyiv's position, and into trade questions among Ukraine's western neighbours and partners.
