KYIV (Reuters) – Slovak truckers have ended a blockade of the sole road freight border crossing with Ukraine, a Slovak hauliers’ association and Ukraine’s state border service said on Friday.
Slovak hauliers blocked truck traffic from Ukraine on Monday, demanding the European Union reintroduce restrictions on access to the bloc for Ukrainian trucking firms that were removed after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.
Hauliers’ association UNAS said on Facebook it had lifted the blockade starting at 9 p.m. (2000 GMT) on Thursday.
“We are doing it at the call of security forces and we respect that. Just as they respected our right to protest,” UNAS said in a post.
The Ukrainian border service said on the Telegram messaging app that about 60 trucks had cleared the Uzhhorod crossing to leave Ukraine, and another 1,065 lorries were in the electronic queue to leave.
Due to the almost month-long blockade of the Polish-Ukrainian border, a significant number of lorries have used Slovak border crossings to cross into the EU.
The protesters want to end Ukrainian truckers’ permit-free access to the EU and say Ukrainian drivers are undercutting their prices.
Kyiv says the volume of wartime traffic makes a truck permit system impracticable.
(Reporting by Jason Hovet in Prague and Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv; Editing by Nick Macfie)
