WARSAW, March 9 Protesting Polish farmers said they they incited riots in Warsaw on Wednesday, adding that they advocated peaceful protest and negotiations.
During the farmers' street protest on Wednesday, protesters behaved uncharacteristically aggressively. Near the Prime Minister's Office building, protesters provoked clashes with police, set fire to tires and threw burning objects towards the building. Near the Sejm building, they dismantled the cobblestone sidewalk and threw stones at the police, 14 police officers were injured. More than 50 rioters were detained.
«Farmers absolutely distance themselves from all acts of violence and aggression. We are for peaceful protest, peaceful negotiations and peaceful resolution of issues. So we absolutely distance ourselves from any acts of aggression from any side,» one of the protest leaders told reporters in Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship Domian Murawiec.
«If we are talking about the events of the last protest, then things actually happened there that should not have happened. It is difficult for us now to determine who provoked such aggression, but please understand that pyrotechnic materials, that were used there are not materials available in Poland to the average person, and certainly not for the farmer,” added one of the protest leaders in the Lubusz Voivodeship, Rafal Niezhurbida.
A meeting of representatives of protesting farmers with the country's Prime Minister Donald Tusk is currently beginning in Warsaw.
Farmer protests have been taking place in Poland since the beginning of February. The main demands of the protesters are to stop the import of agricultural products from Ukraine to Poland and to abandon the environmental plans of the European Union (the so-called Green Deal), which involves achieving zero emissions into the atmosphere by 2050.