The border on the Polish side: people selling cheap vodka and cigarettes brought over from Ukraine. | Annabelle Chapman Europe’s new Iron Curtain Where prosperous West meets troubled East.

SHEHYNI, Ukraine — Ukrainians call it the kordon, the border.

With most EU countries reluctant to anger Russia by offering Ukraine even the distant prospect of membership, the border is here to stay, cutting off the volatile ex-Soviet east from the prosperous EU west. The implications for Ukraine are devastating.

For Ukrainians, one road into the EU winds through the Shehyni-Medyka pedestrian border crossing on the Ukrainian-Polish border. A long walkway flanked by high metal fences leads first to a Ukrainian checkpoint, then a Polish one. Two queues lead into the Polish building: a broad one for “All Passports” and a side-gate for citizens of EU countries.

Vodka, cigarettes, armor

On a good day, with an EU passport, it can take fifteen minutes to cross from Ukraine into Poland. In high season, in the non-EU queue, it can mean a two-hour wait, a missed train and a bruised ribcage from the crowd pushing against the metal railings.

Most of the people in line are traders, known as “ants” because of the heavy loads they carry. Some head into Poland with cheap cigarettes and vodka, others return laden with goods unavailable or overpriced in Ukraine.

“I have twelve tins of oil and a child’s cot,” a Ukrainian man reports back to his boss as the overloaded minibus sets off from the Polish city of Przemyśl towards the border. On the road heading east, it passes massive food, homeware and electronics stores. For last-minute purchases, there is a branch of the Biedronka discount food chain right by the pedestrian crossing.

“It’s more expensive to buy things abroad now,” says one woman waiting in the “All passports” line, referring to how Ukraine’s hryvnia has lost value against the euro since her country descended into war and economic chaos more than a year ago. “But the ones who return with euros are kings here.”

After the conflict in the Donbas against Russian-backed separatists began last year, a new kind of “ant” appeared on the border; volunteers taking body armor and helmets into Ukraine. By carrying it themselves, one set at a time, they got around EU rules. It’s for their own self-defense, they tell the Polish border guards.

As daunting as it seems today, this border is fairly new. A hundred years ago the lands on either side were part of Galicia, a multi-ethnic backwater of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When that empire collapsed in 1918, the area became part of newly independent Poland, along with its key metropolis, Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine).

The border did not exist until World War II. The Polish-Soviet frontier was shifted west. The lands east of it became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic; most of the local Poles were shipped west, never to return.

For all the talk of friendship between Socialist nations, cross-border contact between Ukraine and Poland was not encouraged. The border became a sort of second Iron Curtain within the Communist bloc, in addition to the one running through Berlin. Polish holiday-goers could cut through western Ukraine on their way to sunny Bulgaria, but were not supposed to linger.

Communism fell, bringing a period of relative openness that lasted until Poland joined the EU in 2004. As the EU’s eastern border moved east from the German-Polish to the Polish-Ukrainian border, Poland was forced to introduce visas for Ukrainians. The hard border is needed to balance the freedom of movement created by the Schengen area, the EU says.

These days Ukrainians need a Schengen visa to travel to the EU. A “small border traffic” agreement between Warsaw and Kiev allows Ukrainians living near the frontier to travel in the area without a visa. This gets them as far as Przemyśl and, vitally, the big box stores along the way. The more enticing cities of Kraków or Warsaw are out of bounds.

Today, crossing the border from Poland into Ukraine is like stepping back in time. Even the poor region of Podkarpacie, in the south-eastern corner of Poland, is miles ahead. It has benefited from Poland’s EU membership and the funds that come with it. In December, it got €2 billion from the European Regional Development Fund, most of which will go towards transport infrastructure. On the Ukrainian side of the border, even the bus stops are screaming to be renovated.

More broadly, these obvious differences reflect the economic divergence between Poland and Ukraine since the fall of communism. Ukraine’s GDP per capita in constant U.S. dollars was half of Poland in 1990, according to World Bank figures. Today, GDP per capita in Ukraine is a bit lower than it was in 1990 while in Poland it has more than doubled.

This has made Poland, which is not a rich country by EU standards, a symbol of prosperity for Ukrainians. They flock to work in Poland in much the same way that Poles head to Britain for well-paid jobs. But the border and discouraging visa process means that for many in Ukraine, Poland and the rest of the EU remain a distant dream.

The gap is set to grow

Ukraine’s growing economic and security woes mean the already wide gap with Poland is set to grow.

Tucked away on the Ukrainian side of the border is Lviv. A century ago it was one of the great central European cities, buzzing with intellectual and cultural life, tree-lined avenues and a grand opera house. In the Soviet Union, Lviv acquired a reputation as an outpost of European civilization.

Today, Lviv still has the same buildings and streets, but its progress since Ukrainian independence in 1991 has been stymied, in part due to the rigidity of the border that blocks flows between east and west.

Nobody in Lviv doubts that their city is in Europe, whether or not Brussels acknowledges it. Reminders of this proximity are at every corner. Kiosks sell “Products from Europe”: jars of pesto sauce from Italy, stock cubes from Poland, key destinations for migrant workers from western Ukraine.

Driving towards the border, the radio picks up signals from Poland, from disco beats to the ultra-Catholic Radio Maryja. The EU is so close you can almost touch it, but in some ways it has never seemed further away.