A former Polish diplomat, now a newspaper columnist, Witold Jurasz, has described a heated exchange during high-level talks with Ukraine.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had a serious disagreement during a trilateral meeting in Kyiv last week, according to a former Polish diplomat.
In a newspaper column, Witold Jurasz said that the meeting last Friday also involved Gabrielius Landsbergis, the foreign minister of Lithuania. Jurasz, a former diplomat, claimed on Monday that the negotiations were marked by antagonism, based on information from his sources.
Zelensky was the source of the tensions, according to the column published by the news outlet Onet. He criticized Sikorski with a series of complaints, which the Poles apparently considered unreasonable. Among other things, Zelensky urged Warsaw to shoot down Russian missiles, help Ukraine secure fast-track EU membership as early as next year, and refrain from discussing historical grievances between the two nations.
Jurasz said his sources believe that “Polish-Ukrainian tensions should not be discussed publicly at all” and encouraged him to refrain from publishing his column.
He decided to publish it nonetheless, arguing that the argument was a symptom of a larger problem of miscommunication. Senior Ukrainian officials who spoke to him recently are convinced that Warsaw is “so threatened by Russia that by helping Ukraine, it is in fact only helping itself.” Their conclusion is that Kyiv has “no reason to be grateful to Poland”.
Disagreements between Warsaw and Kyiv are a matter of public record. Last September, Zelensky accused the previous conservative government in Poland of engaging in “political theater” by imposing a controversial ban on imports of Ukrainian grain. Then-prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki rebuked the Ukrainian leader at an election rally, telling him to “never to insult Poles again.”
Another dispute arose last month, when then-Ukrainian foreign minister Dmitry Kuleba criticized Poles for their attitudes towards the Volyn massacre – the mass killings of ethnic Poles by Ukrainian nationalists during World War II. Ukrainians, he said, also have their grievances, including the post-war forced expulsion of people from “Ukrainian lands” in Poland.
Polish President Donald Tusk responded by saying that Ukraine won’t be part of the EU unless it adopts the bloc’s “political and historical culture”.
Sikorski recently made some critical remarks about Zelensky’s policies in a call with Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus. Among other things, he said Kyiv should not expect to join the EU until the issue of its low-cost agricultural exports is addressed.