Poland surprised by Zelenskyy's criticism about insufficient aid – media

Witold Jurasz, a columnist and journalist at the Polish media outlet Onet, has reported, citing sources, that a Polish delegation was surprised by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s communication style during negotiations in Kyiv last week.

Source: European Pravda; a column by Jurasz on the Onet website

Details: During negotiations with the Polish delegation, led by Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, Zelenskyy is said to have accused Poland of giving Ukraine insufficient support in its EU accession talks.

The Ukrainian president is also reported to have expressed indignation that Poland did not supply Ukraine with enough military equipment because "it didn’t want to do it" (a quote from the column) and did not down Russian missiles and drones while they were in Ukrainian airspace.

Zelenskyy was unconvinced by Sikorski’s argument that Poland would not engage its air defence without coordinating it with NATO, Jurasz said.

Another cause of the dispute between the Poles and Zelenskyy was the Volyn tragedy [the massacres of Poles that took place in the Volyn region during the Second World War]. Zelenskyy is alleged to have said that Warsaw is using this issue due to domestic policy. Zelenskyy was said to have been unconvinced by Sikorski’s argument that Ukraine should regard the exhumation and burial [of the victims] as a Christian gesture.

"Some people present at the conversation told Onet that at one point the atmosphere was so bad that it could be described as a scandal," Jurasz said. He noted that the Lithuanian delegation led by Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis was also present, and it "made no attempt to support the Polish minister".

The Ukrainian officials contacted by Onet attempted to present the conversation in such a way as to make it look as if Sikorski was to blame for the tense atmosphere, Jurasz says.

"The meeting between the head of Polish diplomacy and the Ukrainian president shows that relations between Warsaw and Kyiv are, sadly, in crisis. The Poles present at the meeting were surprised, to put it mildly, by the style in which President Zelenskyy communicated," Jurasz stated.

He also said several Polish members of the delegation to Kyiv had tried to persuade him not to publish his column, saying that "Polish-Ukrainian tension should not be discussed publicly".

Background:

• European Pravda recently talked to Ukrainian and Polish historians about the problems in the bilateral relations between Kyiv and Warsaw and how to solve them.
• We recently interviewed Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski.

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