“Policeman Good and Evil.”
The interagency dialog has so far followed a “good cop” format. The Ukrainian Sanitary and Veterinary Authority assured the Moldovan National Food Safety Agency ANSA of openness and willingness to deepen cooperation.
Logos Press sources claim that the Ukrainian side has already identified the company that supplied the(Moldovan) market with feed with metronidazole residues and shut it down for a period of investigation – to identify the causes and determine the consequences.
But at the intergovernmental level the dialog is going on more strictly. Ukrainian and Moldovan mass media note that during the online meeting, Ukrainian Minister of Economy, Environment and Agriculture Oleksiy Sobolev informed his Moldovan counterpart Ludmila Catlabuga about the intention to “conduct a study in accredited laboratories”.
Disclosing brackets, knowledgeable sources say that they meant representative sampling at the largest poultry farms in Ukraine and their research not only by accredited national, but also by reference European laboratories. The results, as it seems, are already available. This, it must be assumed, confirms the official statements of the Ukrainian authorities and business associations that “we are confident in the quality of Ukrainian products”.
As Anatoliy Tritiak, director of MMD Group, noted in a conversation with Logos Press correspondent, his trading partner – Ukrainian agro-industrial holding Myronivsky Hliboproduct OJSC – is not inclined “to compromise on quality: for big and rich markets – one thing, for small and poor markets – another”. If only because it is not economically profitable to change technology for the sake of tiny batches of products.
All this once again indicates that, as Logos Press wrote earlier, Ukrainian partners consider the ban on supplies of Ukrainian chicken to Moldova as a protectionist measure aimed at “eliminating a competitor in the form of Ukraine from the Moldovan poultry meat market”.
Mirror measures
After the official online meeting on the problem of unblocking supplies of Ukrainian chicken to the Moldovan market did not yield quick results, a reference to the “underwater part of the iceberg” appeared in the Moldovan information space.
Thus, the ipn.md news agency reported that earlier Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Taras Cacca sent a letter to Moldovan Deputy Prime Minister Eugeniu Osmocescu and MAIA head Liudmila Catlabuga, in which he warned that Ukraine could impose a retaliatory ban on Moldovan products, referring to the provisions of the Moldovan-Ukrainian Free Trade Agreement.
The agency’s sources in diplomatic circles confirmed that it could be about Kiev’s ban on imports of Moldovan grape and wine products. Ukraine buys $30.7m worth of alcohol and $8m worth of grapes from Moldova. In 2025, Ukraine exported 18.4 thousand tons of chicken to Moldova for $32.7m.
Logos Press sources noted that if the “chicken conflict” drags on, it may also spread to the energy sector.
