A summit without a high point

The Russia-EU summit last Friday in Volzhsky Utyos near Samara, Russia, failed to produce the sort of meaningful breakthrough necessary to relaunch talks on the partnership agreement between the two sides. Once again, the major stumbling block in negotiations was the ban on Polish food imports.

"We haven't solved the issue of the Polish meat," Russian President Vladimir Putin announced, although he expressed a desire to further work on the subject. But he added that the meat coming from and via Poland was of "low quality, which cannot satisfy Russia."

Both the European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel stood behind Poland in the matter. "The Polish problem is a European problem," Barroso said, and expressed incredulity about Putin's argument that Polish meat is of low quality. "We believe there are no reasons for the ban. If there were, we wouldn't allow for Polish meat to be distributed on the EU market," he stated.

Moreover, Angela Merkel also found fault with Putin's reasoning that the meat ban should be solved bilaterally by Russia and Poland. 

Poland has been threatening to veto the start of the talks on the partnership agreement between Russia and the EU because of the Russian ban, which originally concerned only meat when it began in 2005 and was later extended to other food products.

Law and Justice's (PiS) party whip, Marek Kuchciński, told the Polish Press Agency he felt the summit had been "a great success of Polish diplomacy."

"The President and the Prime Minister stood their ground and forced the EU to acknowledge that this is an issue between the EU and Russia, and not between Russia and Poland," he explained.