The Polish Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa has written an open letter to US President Donald Trump slamming his behaviour during his recent Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Wałęsa said Trump’s approach was similar to that of the Communist secret police.
The ex-Polish president and Nobel Prize winner’s letter was signed by 38 other former political prisoners of Poland’s former Communist regime.
They expressed “horror and distaste” at Trump’s treatment of Zelensky in the meeting on February 28 at which the Ukrainian head of state had been expected to sign an agreement with the US over the exploitation of Ukrainian minerals.
The letter, made public on March 3, compared the angry exchanges in the Oval Office last month with interrogations carried out by the former Communist government’s secret police.
“We were also horrified by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of the one we remember well from interrogations by the Security Service [SB, the Communist secret police] and from courtrooms in Communist courts,” stated the letter.
“Prosecutors and judges, commissioned by the all-powerful Communist political police, also explained to us that they held all the cards and we had none. They demanded that we cease our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people were suffering because of us.”
Wałęsa, who met Trump during the US President’s first term on a visit to Poland in 2017, and the other signatories of the letter argued he should follow the example of president Ronald Reagan and other US leaders regarding engagement in Europe.
“The history of the 20th century shows that every time the United States wanted to maintain distance from democratic values and its European allies, it ended up threatening itself,” he wrote.
The letter also objected to Trump’s expectation of Ukrainian gratitude for US assistance, calling that demand “offensive”. The signatories declared that “gratitude should be given to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed blood in defence of the values of the free world”.
Wałęsa’s letter concluded by reminding the US President about the Budapest Memorandum signed by the US, the UK and Russia “which explicitly commits the signatories to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine”. It added that these “guarantees were unconditional without any mention about there being a need for economic exchange”.
As a result of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Ukraine gave up the rights to the post-Soviet nuclear weapons stationed on its soil in return for its borders being guaranteed.
Wałęsa is an ally of the centre-left government led by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and has for years been in conflict with the Conservative PiS opposition led by Jarosław Kaczyński.
Wałęsa fell out with Kaczyński when the PiS was in power over the former Solidarity’s leader’s alleged co-operation with the Communist secret police.
Wałęsa denied the accusations but they were allegedly substantiated by documents in secret police files, which have been publicly acknowledged.
PiS and the right-wing Confederation party were considered allies of Trump and the US Republicans,, whereas Tusk and his coalition were allies of the US Democratic party.
The current Polish President Andrzej Duda, who is allied to the PiS, on March 1 called on Zelensky to get back to talks with the US, whereas Tusk and other government politicians expressed solidarity with Zelensky and Ukraine.
Wałęsa stood for the presidency in 1990 on a ticket of holding the former Communists to account for their 44 years of rule in Poland.
As head of state he pursued a highly pragmatic approach in which he distanced himself from Poland’s political Right and was instrumental in the bringing down of a right-wing administration that briefly governed after the first free parliamentary elections of 1991.
During Wałęsa’s term as president, he negotiated the exit of Russian forces from Poland, but he was criticised for pushing the idea of Central Europe setting up its own defence and military organisations. At the time, many Polish politicians perceived that as being promoted by Russia.
In the 1995 election, Wałęsa lost to the post-Communist Left’s candidate Aleksander Kwaśniewski and, despite attempts to revive his political career over the years, he has remained on the margins of Polish politics.
