Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski has called US President Donald Trump’s decision to hold direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin a “mistake”.
Sikorski claimed that failure to ensure a balanced peace deal for Ukraine would weaken US credibility and encourage China to attack Taiwan.
The minister who, along with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, has been highly critical of Trump, made his remarks on February 15 at the Munich Security Conference alongside his British, French and German counterparts.
“I think the call was a mistake,” Sikorski said of Trump’s conversation with Putin on February 12, adding that he had “argued against an early summit”. He claimed it may also “vindicate Putin and lower morale in Ukraine.”
He went on to say that if Trump allowed Putin “to vassalise Ukraine, that will send a message to China that you can recover what you regard as a renegade province – and that would have direct consequences for US grand strategy, for the US system of alliances and for the future of Taiwan”.
He noted that Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden had “planted the US flag in downtown Kyiv and declared on behalf of the United States that the US will be with Ukraine for as long as it takes until Ukraine secures its independence”.
This, according to Sikorski, meant the US was honour bound to seek a fair deal for Kyiv.
“Therefore, the credibility of the United States depends on how this war ends – not just the Trump administration, but the United States,” he said.
Responding to concerns that European leaders would be excluded from peace talks between Ukraine, Russia and the US, Sikorski reminded listeners that Trump had said European troops would need to be in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force that would underpin any deal.
“We’ll have to be asked to supply them, so sooner or later we’ll have to be involved,” he said.
That was despite the fact that the Polish Government, while being supportive of Ukraine, has so far refused to entertain the prospect of sending troops to any peacekeeping mission in Ukraine.
As for Trump’s attitude to Europe, Sikorski said he felt the US President was testing his allies.
“President Trump has a method of operation ,which the Russians call ‘razvedka boyem’, ‘reconnaissance through battle’: You push and you see what happens and then you change your position,” he said.
“These are legitimate tactics and we need to respond to them,” Sikorski added.
Finally, in a reference to rumours that the US President was eyeing the Nobel Peace prize, Sikorski quipped that the US President needed to remember “that we Europeans control the Nobel Peace Prize, so if you want to earn it, the peace has to be fair”.
US envoy Keith Kellogg on February 15 said European states would not be present at the negotiations initiated by Trump but, as Sikorski acknowledged when he spoke to reporters on February 16, the US has let its allies know what the negotiating strategy with Russia was to entail.
