The current Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and the head of the Polish Embassy Bogdan Klich – these are just some of the names that appear in the “courteous” letter from Nikolai Patrushev to Stanisław Koziej, head of the National Security Bureau (BBN) during President Bronisław Komorowski’s tenure.
Prof. Sławomir Cenckiewicz, head of the National Security Bureau, posted today on social media scans of a 2011 document in Russian along with its Polish translation.
It was a letter of thanks from Nikolai Patrushev, known as Vladimir Putin’s right-hand man, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, and former head of the FSB, addressed to Stanisław Koziej, then head of the BBN under President Komorowski.
Patrushev thanked Koziej “wholeheartedly for organising his visit to Poland on January 31 – February 2, 2011, and for the generous hospitality and attention that our delegation enjoyed throughout its stay on Polish soil.”
“There will be no meetings, agreements, cooperation, hosting of FSB officials, feasts, trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg to the criminal Patrushev, nor the so-called ‘development of positive and mutually beneficial strategic relations with Russia’ at the BBN during President Karol Nawrocki’s term,”
Prof. Cenckiewicz declared firmly.
He added that the document comes from a 2023 preliminary research at the BBN.
“A signed cooperation plan”
In Patrushev’s letter to Koziej, there is an extensive passage mentioning names well known in politics.
“The meeting with President Bronisław Komorowski was of particular importance, as it became proof of the consistency of the course aimed at normalising Russian-Polish relations. The exchange of views with Ministers Bogdan Klich and Radosław Sikorski was also useful. I consider our consultations and the signed cooperation plan between the apparatuses of the Security Council of the Russian Federation and the National Security Bureau of the Republic of Poland for the years 2011-2012 to be fruitful,”
the Russian wrote.
The subject of Patrushev’s visit to Poland and the agreement signed with Klich, then Minister of National Defence, appeared in one episode of the series Reset by Prof. Cenckiewicz and Michał Rachoń.
The authors revealed that Bogdan Klich tried to persuade the Russians to bilateral meetings with the Russian Minister of Defence as well as to joint consultations on military reform strategy and the purchase of Russian armaments.
Koziej goes to Yekaterinburg
“I look forward to continuing our constructive cooperation in the current year [2011]. I would be pleased with your participation in the second international meeting of senior officials responsible for security issues, to be held in the second half of September in Yekaterinburg,” Patrushev added in his letter to Stanisław Koziej.
Koziej accepted this invitation. A communiqué has even been preserved on the website of the National Security Bureau. The then-head of the BBN gave a speech during one of the conference sessions.
“The head of the BBN emphasised that the condition for the effectiveness of international cooperation in the face of manifestations of extremism and crises caused by ethnic hatred, religious intolerance, and racism is the building of an adequate level of trust, openness, and reciprocity in the security sphere, as well as abandoning an approach based on the balance of fear. (…) In his speech, the head of the BBN also stated that Poland supports the elimination in practice of dividing lines within the international community – among other things through the stabilization and reconstruction of Afghanistan, the development of an allied missile defense system open to cooperation with partners outside NATO, and through concrete actions aimed at terrorism and proliferation,”
reads part of the note.
Earlier, in 2010, Koziej had met with Patrushev in Moscow.
“The slowdown of the EU and NATO enlargement process after the August 2008 Russian-Georgian conflict and the presidential elections in Ukraine in early 2010 pushed the dispute over the geopolitical future of the former Soviet republics, which had strained Polish-Russian relations, into the background,”
stated a briefing note received by the then-head of the BBN before that meeting.