Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister, has said a new geopolitical order is being created and that there will be no return to the situation before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Speaking at the opening of the 15th European Economic Congress in the southern Polish city of Katowice on Monday, Morawiecki said the European Union “cannot return to what was,” and that the rules of doing business with Russia must be changed.
“All principles related to trade with a criminal must undergo essential change,” Morawiecki said, adding that there would be no return to the pre-war status quo.
“We are building a new geopolitical order,” he said.
The Polish prime minister also said that ever more countries were coming to understand the great threat that Russia represents and that Russian aggression needed to be stemmed “here and now” through sanctions.
He said that following the Second World War, Europe had “risen from the ashes” and created the necessary institutions in the form of the Marshall Plan, the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community, in order to build peace.
“We’re proposing a reconstruction plan for Ukraine, hope for Ukraine, but also the whole European Union, which will be based on new geopolitical assumptions,” Morawiecki said. “Bill Clinton once said ‘it’s the economy, stupid,’ today I think that is not enough, we have to say ‘it’s geopolitics, stupid,’ we have to pay attention to all the international realities that are occurring around us.
“When (former Russian Prime Minister – PAP) Dmitry Medvedev mockingly observed that Europe could not last a single day without gas from Russia, we were told that our hard attitude to Russia was a Russophobic attitude. Today we see that ever more countries, including in Western Europe, understand the great threat from Russia.”
Morawiecki added that he was less afraid of severing supply chain ties with Russia than of calls to re-establish them too quickly.
“We must definitely stem the tide of Russian aggression here and now – and we do that through sanctions, and we must not allow a return to what was (before),” Morawiecki said.