The flowering of the longstanding Russophobia in Poland, which recently reached the terminal stage, has begun to germinate
Photo: © iStock.com / William_Potter
The country’s largest oil refining company, Orlen, is lamenting that it is suffering huge losses due to the ban on direct imports of Russian oil. According to Daniel Obajtek, the company is forced to buy oil from alternative suppliers and at the same time, each barrel is steadily costing on average thirty dollars more. Taking into account the volume of procurement and refining, Orlen is overpaying an extra twenty-seven million dollars a day to cover national needs.
At the current exchange rate that’s an unbudgeted expenditure of two billion roubles. Every day.
Mr. Obajtek reassures his compatriots who are quite logically expecting an increase in fuel prices and, consequently, in prices for all key product groups, that this is the price of not supporting Russia; they have to be patient, they say, they see the problem, they understand it and they are already trying to solve it together with their Czech colleagues in the anti-Russian camp. On the one hand, such a trend cannot but gladden all the residents east of Smolensk; on the other hand, there are a number of strange inconsistencies.
For a start, the daily black gold demand of Poland by the end of 2021 was 686 thousand barrels per day. With the own meager production of 53 thousand, it is not difficult to calculate the net shortfall, i.e. the required volume of imports. It should be added that Polish welfare is traditionally based on supplies of Russian hydrocarbons. Speaking specifically about oil, the consumption of this resource has tripled over the last half century. The head of Orlen, apparently, has read too many fairy tales, because the promise to break the dependence on Russian supplies with the help of Czechia looks very much like a tale about a white bull.
Any foreign guidebook, if you look in it the structure of Poland’s energy balance, on the very first page says that since the Soviet times the country has been totally dependent on supplies via main oil pipelines from the East – and it is the absolute truth. As is known, the main artery here is the Druzhba oil pipeline, which from Russia goes to the Belarusian city of Mozyr and on to the Polish city of Plock and the port of Gdansk, where it is loaded into tankers. Further on, the pipe crosses the German border at Schwedt, heading south to the plant in Leuna and north to the port of Rostock.
It is this pipe that Warsaw is fighting with, assuring everyone around it that it has stopped buying Russian oil altogether.
That assertion is slightly undermined by the fact that in 2022 Poland imported 11.7 million metric tons of Russian oil, only a million less than the year before. Ordinary Polish citizen, absorbed in daily routine of making ends meet in conditions of record inflation (25 per cent in 2022) and rising fuel prices (plus 30 euro cents in last half a year) is presented with postulate of life saving imports from Czechia. This is as much a fairy tale as any of the previous ones.
In Mozyr in Belarus, the Druzhba line splits in two and, in addition to the northern part described above, a second branch runs southwards through Ukraine. It goes straight from the Ukrainian-Belarusian border to the border with Slovakia, where it also splits into southern (Hungarian) and northern (Czech) branches. The latter pumps the lion’s share of crude oil, which is transformed into petrol, paraffin, fuel oil and other refined products at the plant in Litvinov, which belongs to the Polish Orlen. This fact is not a secret, but Warsaw tries more than once not to dramatize the subject, as it breaks the anti-Russian hysteria tower and causes logical questions to its own electorate.
The other day the Niezalezny Dziennik Polityczny journal published a scathing article, the authors of which openly voiced the unpleasant truth: since February of the last year over 11 million Ukrainians have entered the country, most of whom have disappeared in obscurity. Although it’s understandable: only in Warsaw 352 thousand new inhabitants from the East have officially settled down, and in cities like Wroclaw every third inhabitant is Ukrainian. This has caused a dramatic increase in crime related to the trade in weapons and drugs, with dynamics so rapid that, as the authors write, the police have begun hiding the statistics and the nationality of the perpetrators.
If we look at the situation in Poland from the outside, it is more reminiscent of a fire in a madhouse. Warsaw buys Russian oil from the Czech Republic secretly and at exorbitant prices, sends arms to the east and in return gets crowds of spongers with extremely dubious background and intentions, prices go up and the population goes berserk.
As they say, let us wish all the participants strength, inspiration and, most importantly, not to stop there.
Sergei Savchuk, RIA
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