WARSAW: Thousands of Poles took to the streets of Warsaw on Saturday to march against illegal immigration and European migration policy, according to AFP journalists.
Under heavy rain, protesters heeded a call from the main opposition Law and Justice party (PiS), which backs nationalist President Karol Nawrocki.
Supporters gathered at Castle Square at 2:00 p.m. (12:00 GMT) in the city’s Old Town, with many arriving by bus from across the country, waving Polish flags.
“I see what is happening in the West. I have two children who live in Germany, and I see the danger there and its impact on German identity. Germans now feel like minorities in their own country,” a 64-year-old retiree told AFP.
A large majority of the country, including supporters of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s pro-EU governing coalition, favors the tightening of migration policy and a tougher stance on Ukrainian refugees, according to opinion polls.
Nawrocki and Tusk’s government are divided on immigration, foreign policy and support for Ukraine.
Nawrocki and the PiS party have repeatedly criticized the European Union’s migration pact, adopted last year and set to come into force in June 2026.
Under the agreement, member states would either be required to take in thousands of migrants from “frontline” countries or provide additional funding instead.
In a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen this week, Nawrocki said Poland, which has welcomed more than one million Ukrainian refugees since Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country in February 2022, had done its part.
“The overwhelming majority of Poles, from all political leanings, oppose the forced relocation of migrants to Poland,” he wrote.
“I will not consent to the implementation of the Migration and Asylum Pact in Poland,” he added.
Thousands rally in Warsaw against migrant policies
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Thousands rally in Warsaw against migrant policies
- Under heavy rain, protesters heeded a call from the main opposition Law and Justice party
- Nawrocki and Tusk’s government are divided on immigration, foreign policy and support for Ukraine
Power outages hit Ukraine and Moldova as Kyiv struggles against the winter cold
- Outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova
- Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions
KYIV: Emergency power cuts swept across several Ukrainian cities as well as neighboring Moldova on Saturday, officials said, amid a commitment from the Kremlin to US President Donald Trump to pause strikes on Kyiv as Ukraine battles one of its bleakest winters in years.
Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said that the outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova.
The failure “caused a cascading outage in Ukraine’s power grid,” triggering automatic protection systems, he said.
Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions, in the center and northeast of the country respectively. The outage cut water supplies to the Ukrainian capital, officials said, while the city’s subway system was temporarily suspended because of low voltage on the network.
Moldova also experienced major power outages, including in the capital Chisinau, officials said.
“Due to the loss of power lines on the territory of Ukraine, the automatic protection system was triggered, which disconnected the electricity supply,” Moldova’s Energy Minister Dorin Junghietu said in a post on Facebook. “I encourage the population to stay calm until electricity is restored.”
Weaponizing winter
The large-scale outage followed weeks of Russian strikes against Ukraine’s already struggling energy grid, which have triggered long stretches of severe power shortages.
Moscow has sought to deny Ukrainian civilians heat, light and running water over the course of the war, in a strategy that Ukrainian officials describe as “weaponizing winter.”
While Russia has used similar tactics throughout the course of its almost four-year invasion of Ukraine, temperatures throughout this winter have fallen further than usual, bringing widespread hardship to civilians.
Forecasters say Ukraine will experience a brutally cold period stretching into next week. Temperatures in some areas will drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
Trump said late Thursday that President Vladimir Putin had agreed to a temporary pause in targeting Kyiv and other Ukrainian towns amid the extreme weather.
“I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and the cities and towns for a week during this ... extraordinary cold,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Putin has “agreed to that,” he said, without elaborating on when the request to the Russian leader was made.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a query seeking clarity about the scope and timing of any limited pause.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed Friday that Trump “made a personal request” to Putin to stop targeting Kyiv until Sunday “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations.”
Talks are expected to take place between US, Russian and Ukrainian officials on Feb. 1 in Abu Dhabi. The teams previously met in late January in the first known time that officials from the Trump administration simultaneously met with negotiators from both Ukraine and Russia. However, it’s unclear many obstacles to peace remain. Disagreement over what happens to occupied Ukrainian territory, and Moscow’s demand for possession of territory it hasn’t captured, are a key issue holding up a peace deal, Zelensky said Thursday.
Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev said on social media Saturday that he was in Miami, where talks between Russian and US negotiators have previously taken place.
Russia struck Ukrainian energy assets in several regions on Thursday but there were no strikes on those facilities overnight, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday.
In a post on social media, Zelensky also noted that Russia has turned its attention to targeting Ukrainian logistics networks, and that Russian drones and missiles hit residential areas of Ukraine overnight, as they have most nights during the war.
Trump has framed Putin’s acceptance of the pause in strikes as a concession. But Zelensky was skeptical as Russia’s invasion approaches its fourth anniversary on Feb. 24 with no sign that Moscow is willing to reach a peace settlement despite a US-led push to end the fighting.
“I do not believe that Russia wants to end the war. There is a great deal of evidence to the contrary,” Zelensky said Thursday.
