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If we accept Russia’s inhumanity as something normal, we will enable victory for the “Russkij Mir” (Russian order – ed.), an idea which means brutality, aggression, war, poverty and death, Poland’s president said during a sitting of the OSCE Ministerial Council on Thursday.
During the opening session of OSCE Ministerial Council 2022, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Zbigniew Rau underlined that in the face of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the OSCE leadership, supported by the vast majority of participating States, has responded to the challenge responsibly and thoughtfully.
“Faced with an unprecedented crisis, I and my Chairmanship team, and have shouldered the responsibility of defending the OSCE’s principles and protecting its assets, namely its institutions, activities, projects, and – not least – its achievements. I could not have chosen any other course. We were and are guided by the spirit of the Helsinki Accords,”
Rau said.
President of Poland Andrzej Duda addressed the participants of the OSCE Ministerial Council. The delegates are exchanging views on the security situation in the OSCE and are facing unprecedented challenges posed by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
Andrzej Duda said Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine was the first such open act of warfare in Europe since the Second World War.
“For the first time since World War Two, we are confronted by such an open-armed attack on the principles we all agreed on to prevent another war in Europe,”
he said.
Duda added that Russia today was “a criminal state whose policies cannot be condoned and whose words cannot be believed.”
Commenting on Russia’s progressing destruction of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, the president said the international community “shouldn’t accept the deliberate annihilation of the civilian population.”
“This should not be viewed as normal, this cannot be ignored (…) Russia’s policy based on anti-values against which we agreed to pool our forces to build a Europe… where individual freedom and human life are respected,”
Polish President added.