WARSAW — Donald Trump in the White House doesn’t have to mean a collapse of the effort to defeat Russia in Ukraine, the Polish and Ukrainian leaders said on Wednesday in the Polish capital.
“We expect active joint work in the spirit of peace through strength with the newly elected U.S. President Trump,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at a press conference alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
It was part of a broader summit to firm up the “strategic partnership” between the two key allies that aims to finally end long-running tensions over World War II massacres, to underline that Warsaw supports Ukraine joining the European Union, and to jointly press for more defense spending and tougher sanctions against Russia.
The immediate issue was Trump, who will be sworn in again as U.S. president on Monday.
Trump famously said he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office, leading to worries he would force Kyiv into an unfavorable peace deal. However, in recent days, Trump’s advisers have suggested any ceasefire might still be months away.
“We have not yet fixed any deadlines,” Zelenskyy said.
Tusk argued that the new U.S. administration will be less likely to abandon Ukraine if European countries can show they are serious about defending themselves.
“Instead of reading between the lines of President Trump let’s do our homework,” the Polish PM said. He urged NATO member countries to ramp up their spending on defense.
Trump recently called on NATO to increase its defense spending goal from 2 percent of GDP to 5 percent — a target that no member country except for Poland is close to reaching.
Poland aims to spend 4.7 percent of GDP on defense this year, the highest in NATO.
“The new Washington administration, once it sees how serious we are about this, will adopt a different approach, a more optimistic approach towards Ukraine,” Tusk predicted, adding: “If all the members of Europe and NATO spent as much as Poland for their defense we would be spending 10 times more than Russia.”
He said the best security guarantees for Ukraine would be for the country to join NATO, although he acknowledged this would be “controversial.” Washington and key NATO members like Germany have balked at issuing Ukraine an invitation to join.
Tusk pushed back at the suggestion of sending European troops to Ukraine, an idea first touted by French President Emmanuel Macron but which is being mulled by other alliance members.
A bloody past
The two leaders also took the opportunity to signal they are moving past their mutual bloody past, making a breakthrough on agreeing to exhume bodies of people murdered during Second World War massacres.
In 1943, a guerrilla group called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (known by its Ukrainian acronym, UPA) slaughtered thousands of Poles to ethnically cleanse lands that had been part of Poland before the war but are now in western Ukraine. The exact numbers are in dispute, with Ukraine saying tens of thousands died, while Poland saying up to 100,000 were killed.
The killings continue to haunt both countries. Poles call it a genocide, while some Ukrainians point to retaliatory killings by Poles and put some of the blame on Polish repression of Ukrainian national aspirations before the war.
Warsaw wants the victims exhumed and properly buried, but Ukraine also wants burials for UPA fighters, considering them part of the country’s tradition of fighting for independence.
The danger to both countries posed by Russia is concentrating minds. Although Warsaw and Kyiv are close allies, and Poland has supplied crucial weapons to Ukraine, their ties have been battered by disputes over trade, agricultural imports, truckers, refugees and more.
“In our relations, we must move forward. Our ministries of culture are already working together … Russia is the main threat today, tomorrow. And we must do everything to strengthen our neighborly alliance,” Zelenskyy said.
Historical tensions have been exploited by political extremists in both countries, and also help Moscow, prompting both capitals to move to promote more amiable relations.
“We respect each other and together we stand up to Russian imperialism. Any agreement in UA-PL relations is a blow to Moscow,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said in a statement last week after Tusk announced that progress had been made on the issue.
“There is a decision on the first exhumations of Polish victims of UPA,” Tusk said on social media.
The Polish prime minister also said that he wants to push forward Ukraine’s bid to join the EU during Warsaw’s six months at the helm of a rotating presidency of the Council of the EU.
“The Polish presidency will break the stance that we had in this issue,” Tusk said. Zelenskyy said he wanted to open a “few” negotiating chapters in the coming months.
“This war will end positively for Ukraine and all of Western Europe,” Tusk said. “While we don’t have a short-term scenario, we believe the aggressor won’t emerge victorious.”
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