A bid by the People’s Republic of China’s top diplomat to end a Warsaw-ordered halt to all rail traffic from Belarus has failed, leaving hundreds for freight cars loaded with Chinese electronics and frozen fish stuck on the eastern side of the border with more trains arriving every day, news reports and industry media said on Tuesday.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Polish President Karol Nawrocki for three hours on Monday in talks dominated by a Sept. 11 Warsaw order to shut down all traffic at all border crossings with Belarus and bilateral trade between the two countries, but the lockdown stayed in effect.
Wang was in Warsaw on a pre-planned stop during a diplomatic tour of Austria, Slovenia, and Poland. It was the first visit by a Chinese Foreign Minister to Poland in six years.
Xinhua, the official People’s Republic news agency, ignored the Poland’s lockdown of the Belarusian border, in a Wednesday report on the Wang-Nawrocki talks saying blandly “Wang Yi conveyed President Xi Jinping’s cordial greetings and stated…the China-Poland comprehensive strategic partnership has maintained stable development… The two sides also exchanged views on issues of common concern, including the Ukrainian crisis.”
An analysis published by the semi-independent Society of Belarusian Railway Workers said that prior to the ban daily 80-90 trains crossed the Belarus-Poland border daily, of which 20-30 trains had been loaded in China and carry freight west for customers primarily in Germany, Belgium and the the Netherlands.
With a typical container train 700-900 meters long, and around two dozen westbound trains from China now stacking up at the border every day since the Polish ban went into effect, the Belarusian national railroad will run out of usable sidetrack in a week or less.
As noted by the Belarus Railway Workers Society in an article on its website: “This will already create a serious obstacle to the movement of local trains…in 7-10 days there will be a shortage of free tracks on the Belarusian Railway. Stations will be blocked, and shunting work will be greatly complicated or even impossible.”
The Polish freight industry observer logistyca.rp.pl reported on Monday that 90 percent of rail freight between China and the EU passes through Poland, with some 745,900 TEU (twenty-foot standard containers or equivalents) crossing into the EU state via Belarus in 2024.
That flood of goods worth $29.4 billion, 84.9 percent more than in 2023, is now stopped, the Polish freight analytical group logistyca.rp.pl reported.
About 60 percent of the freight is high-value goods like electronics, machinery and high-tech energy products like lithium batteries and electric vehicles.
Perishable goods like fish products and pharmaceuticals able to reach a European market (in normal circumstances) in two weeks or even make up about 30 percent of the freight flow, data published by the Beijing-supported freight company Chinese-Europe Express showed.
“Trains are at a standstill, road carriers are stuck… Terminals, operators, and border freight forwarders are already considering furloughing employees, because everything hinges on whether the border reopens after four days of maneuvers,” Bartosz Miszkiewicz, CEO of the Polish logistics group Symlog said.
Some freight flow could switch to bypass routes to Europe via Lithuania and Latvia, whose borders with Belarus remain open, but more likely is a switch away from Belarus to slower but more reliable shipment between China and Europe by sea, the SBRW report said.
China through its national export bank as part of the Silk Road initiative has invested massively in a road, air and rail logistics hub to the east of the Belarusian capital Minsk, as the main base of its freight traffic heading to Europe via Russia and Belarus. The site, with an initial investment cost of $500 million, employs about 3,600 workers in 150+ companies.
Chinese companies also have upgraded Belarusian railway infrastructure by electrifying the Minsk-Gomel line and improving high speed traffic capacity on the Brest-Minsk line.
Vladimir Orlovsky, Chair of the Belarusian State Customs Committee, in an interview published on Tuesday by the Belarusian state news agency BELTA, said that its government is “Ready to resume dialogue with Polish colleagues at any time and in any format…Unfortunately, the kind of communication and dialogue that we had in the past (with Polish Customs) no longer exists.”
Poland stopped trade-related coordination work with Belarus in 2022, and since then contact between Polish and Belarusian border officials has been extremely limited, and at times hostile.
In February 2022, Belarus helped the Kremlin launch the full-scale war with Ukraine by permitting Russian troops to invade Ukraine from Belarusian territory, and use air bases in Belarus for air and missile strikes against military and civilian targets in Ukraine. Poland has been among the forefront of states condemning the Russian attack and Belarus’ complicity.
Polish officials last week accused Belarus of collaborating with Russia in launching drone strikes passing through Belarusian airspace to hit NATO territory and of, currently, conducting unsafe military exercises with Russia and Chinese troops in proximity to Poland’s border.
Overnight on Sept. 8-9, a reported 19 Russian strike drones flew into Polish airspace, at least two coming from over Belarus.
President Andrzej Duda visited China in June 2024 and signed an agreement that per press announcements at the time would open up China’s consumer markets to Polish beef and poultry. Since then Warsaw has accused Beijing of not allowing the shipments to go forward.
Polish Minister of Interior and Administration Marcin Kierwiński on Thursday said the ban on passenger and rail traffic moving into Poland from Belarus would remain in effect until “We are certain that the safety of Poles is guaranteed.”
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Paweł Wroński said that Warsaw hopes that Beijing will “counteract” Russia’s “destructive actions” in its war with Ukraine, the major Polish television channel RTR reported on Monday.
“We drew our Chinese partners’ attention to destructive Russian actions,” Wroński said. “We are making a decision [closing the Belarusian border] that is also costly for Poland, but our country has to make that decision due to repeated provocations by Belarus…First you take care of security and only later count the cost.”
Warsaw’s hard-line position on China and Chinese trade and its links to the Russo-Ukrainian War contrasts sharply with that of the White House, which has threatened China with punishing tariffs twice for helping Russia attack Ukraine, only to back off from the threat (in May and Sept. 2025).