Polish democracy advocate Lech Wałęsa and 39 other former prisoners of war sent a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump expressing panic and dismay at the way he treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last Friday.
“We watched the report of your conversation with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenski, with fear and distaste,” the letter begins. “We consider your expectations to show respect and gratitude for the material help provided by the United States fighting Russia to Ukraine insulting. Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world. They have been dying on the frontline for more than 11 years in the name of these values and independence of their homeland, which was attacked by Putin’s Russia. We do not understand how the leader of a country that is the symbol of the free world cannot see it.”
Lech Walesa talks on the telephone in his office at Solidarity headquarters, Gdansk, Poland, December 1980. (Photo by Chuck Fishman/Getty Images)
Walesa, a former Polish president and Solidarity trade union leader, played a key role in the fall of Communism. With this letter he joins heads of state and former political leaders across Europe in condemning Trump’s berating of Zelensky and embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Our panic was also caused by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of one we remember well from Security Service interrogations and from the debate rooms in Communist courts,” the letter explains. “Prosecutors and judges at the behest of the all-powerful communist political police also explained to us that they hold all the cards and we hold none. They demanded us to stop our business, arguing that thousands of innocent people suffer because of us. They deprived us of our freedoms and civil rights because we refused to cooperate with the government and our gratitude. We are shocked that Mr. President Volodymyr Zelenski was treated in the same way.”
Then the group offers Trump a history lesson: “Every time the United States wanted to keep its distance from democratic values and its European allies, it ended up being a threat to themselves. This was understood by President Woodrow Wilson, who decided to join the United States in World War I in 1917. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this, deciding after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that the war for the defense of America would be fought not only in the Pacific, but also in Europe, in alliance with the countries attacked by the Third Reich.”
And then there’s former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, without whom “it would not have been possible to bring the collapse of the Soviet Union empire,” the delegation says. “President Reagan was aware that millions of enslaved people were suffering in Soviet Russia and the countries it conquered, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their sacrifice in defense of democratic values with freedom. His greatness was in the fact that he without hesitation called the USSR the ‘Empire of Evil’ and gave it a decisive fight. We won, and the statue of President Ronald Reagan stands today in Warsaw vis a vis the U.S. embassy.”
While Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Zelensky and demanded he show more gratitude for U.S. aid that has helped his country in the war, Walesa declares there’s something greater than money.
“Material aid — military and financial — cannot be equivalent to the blood shed in the name of independence and freedom.”
“Material aid — military and financial — cannot be equivalent to the blood shed in the name of independence and freedom of Ukraine, Europe, as well as the whole free world. Human life is priceless, its value cannot be measured with money. Gratitude is due to those who make the sacrifice of blood and freedom. It is obvious for us, the people of Solidarity, former political prisoners of the communist regime serving Soviet Russia.”
The letter concludes with a reference to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in which Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom and France agreed to provide security assurances to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine in exchange for Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine giving up their nuclear weapons. The agreement said Russia, the U.S., UK and France would not threaten or use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Russia broke with the Budapest Memorandum in 2014 when it illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea.
Now, Walesa and the other signatories say, the U.S. should withdraw from the promises of the memorandum too, since it is obvious Trump is violating the agreement.
The security guarantees of the document are “unconditional,” they say. “There is no word about treating such aid as an economic exchange.”
Wałęsa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. He led the pro-democracy Solidarity movement that led to the collapse of communism in Poland and inspired other countries to end Russian domination — such as Putin wants to apply to Ukraine today.
Walesa served as Poland’s first popularly elected president from 1990 to 1995.
Related articles:
7 lies Trump is telling about Ukraine | Analysis by Rodney Kennedy
Are we a democracy or a republic? Why words matter | Analysis by Rick Pidcock