Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa expresses concern and distaste at how Trump treats Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
After Friday’s contentious assembly within the Oval Workplace between President Trump, Vice President Vance and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, the White Home was despatched a letter. The writer obtained the Nobel Peace Prize and is a pro-democracy hero in Poland. As NPR’s Central Europe correspondent Rob Schmitz stories, the letter expressed to the Trump administration what the Polish authorities can’t.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: The letter begins along with your excellency Mr. President, however that is the place the honorifics finish. It goes on to check Trump and Vance’s therapy of Zelenskyy to interrogations by political police beneath communist Poland, and it calls for extra respect for a pacesetter whose troopers are shedding blood to defend the free world. We don’t perceive, the letter says, how the chief of a rustic that may be a image of the free world can’t see that. The writer is Lech Walesa, former chief of Poland’s Solidarity motion, the primary Democratically elected president of Poland and Nobel Peace Prize laureate for his management in opposing communist rule. His letter was signed by dozens of different former Polish political prisoners.
ANDRZEJ BOBINKSI: No one needs to say something too vivid, too aggressive in direction of, , Donald Trump and the US. So the one individuals who can do that are people who find themselves now retired.
SCHMITZ: Andrzej Bobinski is managing director of the Warsaw-based journal Polityka Perception. He says the 81-year-old Walesa is ready to voice an opinion many in Poland’s political circles additionally possess however are too scared to say given Poland’s shut relationship with the U.S. and its historic antipathy in direction of Russia.
BOBINKSI: Donald Trump is means too lenient and means too pleasant in direction of Vladimir Putin. And plenty of persons are actually shocked and scared with the place that is heading. Alternatively, no person needs to alienate the US. And I do not assume anyone has come out outright and mentioned that we do not wish to be associates with the US anymore.
SCHMITZ: Actually not Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, who made this assertion after the Oval Workplace incident.
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PRIME MINISTER DONALD TUSK: (Talking Polish).
SCHMITZ: “I do know a story is being created, particularly after that very unusual Friday on the White Home,” mentioned Tusk, “that will divide Europe and the US. “We can’t permit that to occur,” he mentioned. Because the finish of the Chilly Conflict, Poland has been one in all America’s closest allies in Europe, says Bobinski.
BOBINKSI: I feel that is altering. The angle is altering. There’s an enormous generational shift. And I feel that, , by the top of Donald Trump’s time period, Poland will probably be in a really completely different place.
SCHMITZ: And Walesa’s scathing letter, says Bobinski, is an indication of Poland turning away from its longtime buddy. However the place it’s going to flip in direction of is an open query for Poland and for the remainder of Europe.
Rob Schmitz, NPR Information, Berlin.
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