is against immigration. the french have their own battle against illegal immigration from a mostly northern and western africa. marc, thank you very much. it would be a tragic mistake, the british prime minister observed this week, if russia embarked on what it called military adventurism on the borders of poland and ukraine. why would president putin take the risk? after all, the use of migrants as pawns on one external border of the european union, poland s, and the threats of gas supplies to bind moldova and ukraine closer, seems to be selling him pretty well. seems to be serving him pretty well. jeffrey, what exactly do you think vladimir putin s strategy here? vladimir putin has a habit of poking the west, - destabilising at every opportunity he can. l we have seen it| with cyber wars, we have seen it with-
talking about potential- invasion is that things go wrong that missiles - fired, accidents happen, people are killed and it escalates. you know, this is very. much on both sides a war for the hearts and minds of their people. - putin wants his people to - believe that he is a champion for mother russia and that he is going to reclaim its formerl glory, but to go back to the belarus poland migrant situation, there is also. a huge, huge public relations problem because winter- is setting in. and whether or not putin - and lukashenko have provoked this, it is going to be hugely problematic to defend not . letting people in if they are literally l freezing to death on the polish borden so putin s kind of weaponising of migration, this provocationl in ukraine. putin is playing a really hard ball right now- and it is not clear where this takes us but it is a very- frightening situation, -
(MENAFN - ING) In 4Q20, Poland s GDP fell by 2.8% year-on-year versus the consensus at -3.0% and ING s forecast of -2.9%. Despite the deeper contraction than in 3Q20 (-1.5%YoY), the outcome shows increasing resilience to the pandemic.
In the fourth quarter, the number of Covid-19 cases in Poland were several times higher than in the spring, and our index of the closing of the Polish economy indicated that restrictions were a quarter to a half times less onerous, the quarter-on-quarter contraction in GDP (-0.7%) was only about 1/13th of the drop in 2Q20 (-9% QoQ).
The picture is similar in other economies, including Poland s major trading partners. GDP changes and business lockdown index in 2020