“If a presidential candidate in Poland says that our country will never agree to Ukraine joining NATO, there is no better term for what he has done than high treason,” said Prime Minister Donald Tusk when asked about Karol Nawrocki’s declaration, which he signed in the presence of Sławomir Mentzen. In doing so, Tusk also invoked the late President Lech Kaczyński. However, Nawrocki had spoken in the context of Ukraine being at war and did not use the word “never.” Secondly, it was Tusk’s own administration, during the period of the so-called “reset,” that undermined Kaczyński’s efforts to promote NATO accession for Ukraine and Georgia.
Karol Nawrocki, the Law and Justice (PiS)-backed candidate for president, signed a declaration prepared by Mentzen yesterday, which included postulates deemed important by the Confederation’s leader for his electorate. One of the points asserted that Nawrocki, if elected president, would not sign any legislation ratifying Ukraine’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Explaining his endorsement of this point, Karol Nawrocki stated:
“At present, any discussion regarding Ukraine’s entry into NATO is entirely moot. Ukraine joining NATO would mean that the entire North Atlantic Alliance is at war with the Russian Federation.”
Donald Tusk sharply criticized Nawrocki for this stance—falsely, of course.
“If a presidential candidate in Poland—essentially just to appeal to Mr. Mentzen in a broadcast—says that Poland will never agree to Ukraine’s NATO membership, then there is no more appropriate term for what he has done than high treason,” Tusk said on TVN24. He added, “This is one of the biggest scandals of this campaign.”
The Prime Minister further noted: “There were very few matters where full consensus and solidarity existed between the late President Lech Kaczyński and myself when I was Prime Minister.” He continued: “Ours was more a relationship of conflict and political confrontation. But on the matter of Ukraine—its sovereignty, its pro-Western orientation, and its NATO membership—there was complete agreement. He was, in fact, a proponent of this idea.”
Meanwhile, firstly: Karol Nawrocki clearly referred to the ongoing state of war in Ukraine, which is likely to persist for some time. He did not use the word “never.” Quite the opposite—he expressed a preference that, in the distant future, Ukraine should belong to Western rather than Eastern geopolitical structures.
Secondly: Donald Tusk’s stance—openly pro-Russian—differed markedly from the agenda of the late Lech Kaczyński, including on the matter of Ukraine. At the time, Angela Merkel, Tusk’s political patron, was also opposed to the accession of Ukraine and Georgia. In 2008, she opposed U.S. efforts to bring the two countries closer to NATO during the Alliance’s summit. Tusk’s people strongly supported her in this.
In one episode of the documentary series Reset, its authors, Michał Rachoń and Sławomir Cenckiewicz, presented a letter from President Lech Kaczyński to the Prime Minister of Greece, dated March 26, 2008 (the NATO summit was to begin on April 2, 2008). In the correspondence, the president emphasized:
“Among the most important issues to be discussed is NATO’s open-door policy. Europe cannot once again forget about Ukraine and Georgia. Failure to decide on granting these states a Membership Action Plan (MAP) would demonstrate a loss of awareness of NATO’s goals and political significance on Europe’s security map. We cannot allow this.”
This letter was forwarded on March 27, 2008, from the President’s Chancellery to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with an order for urgent diplomatic dispatch. President Kaczyński wanted the letter to reach its recipients before the Bucharest summit (April 2, 2008). However, this did not occur. According to revealed documents, Radosław Sikorski decided to hide the letter in a safe at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for several days.
Maciej Łopiński, a minister in the President’s Chancellery from 2005 to 2010, commented on the delay in the series:
“This document will not be delivered in time to be seriously considered by its recipients. This is an act contrary to the Polish raison d’état. It is, in fact, behaviour that makes Poland look ridiculous.”
Professor Sławomir Cenckiewicz emphasized that President Kaczyński’s letter concerned only one matter:
“That within a clearly defined timeframe, Georgia and Ukraine should be admitted into the community of Western, free, and secure nations through membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Blocking this letter was, in effect, a manoeuvre calculated to strengthen the political agendas of Germany and France. Hiding this letter, preventing it from entering the international diplomatic bloodstream at the time it needed to be sent, constituted sabotage. It was sabotage against Polish interests, against U.S. interests, and against the interests of Ukraine and Georgia.”