Polish leader seeks quick entry for Ukraine, repudiates call to cede territory for peace with Russia

The president of Poland on Tuesday sharply rejected the notion of any cease-fire deal that would require Ukraine to cede territory to Moscow — drawing a clear line in the sand while China, fellow NATO ally Hungary and some leading American politicians are amplifying calls for a rapid negotiated end to the conflict.

Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose nation is the most powerful NATO member state bordering Ukraine, stood firm on the issue in a wide-ranging exclusive interview with The Washington Times as a summit of NATO leaders got underway in Washington.

Russia controls and has annexed an estimated 20% of Ukraine’s territory in the east and south more than two years after its invasion in February 2022.

Ukraine should be “admitted as soon as possible” to the trans-Atlantic alliance, Mr. Duda said.

He warned that the threat from Russian President Vladimir Putin “is at least as dangerous as Soviet Russia” at the height of the Cold War. “There is even a question that Putin’s Russia might be more brutal and more determined than Soviet Russia was back then,” the Polish president said.

A passionate Mr. Duda said Poland, given its proximity to the conflict, knows better than virtually any other European country about the repercussions if Russia is allowed to permanently keep Crimea, a piece of the Donetsk region or any other part of sovereign Ukrainian territory.

“If there is anyone who wants to give to Russia a piece of Ukrainian land and they are not Ukrainian, then let them give a piece of their land to Russia because it is easy to give away a piece of somebody else’s land,” he said. “I would like this war to end as soon as possible. However, it cannot end, it must not end in the victory of Russia because if it happened that way, we will have another war soon because Russia will attack again.

“In a nutshell, Russian imperialism has to be reprimanded. It has to be punished in Ukraine,” Mr. Duda said. “So, this is the only way in which this war can come to an end if the world wants to have peace and calm. If not, we are going to have another war again soon.”

NATO: Stronger than ever?

Mr. Duda, who spoke with The Times inside the Polish Embassy in Washington, fiercely defended Ukraine’s eventual membership in NATO and said he was prepared to go further than other alliance states in pushing for a full, formal invitation to the alliance. Other NATO leaders, including President Biden, have offered a “bridge” to eventual Ukrainian membership but have been reluctant to establish a concrete timetable.

Mr. Duda acknowledged that “Ukraine cannot become a member of NATO” until its conflict with Russia has ended.

The Polish president, 52, also defended the conservative politics of his Law and Justice party, which have put Warsaw at odds with other European Union leaders in Brussels. Since coming to power in 2015, he has been widely regarded as the face of a conservative generational shift in Poland. He is the country’s sixth democratically elected president since the 1989 fall of Soviet communism and Soviet control over Warsaw.

Although Poland has emerged as a leader of Western resolve and strength in the face of Russia’s war in Ukraine, its divisive internal politics and, at times, tense relations with the EU have been on display. Left-leaning critics say the socially conservative Law and Justice party is xenophobic, anti-women, anti-gay and authoritarian. They say the party pushed through undemocratic judicial reforms in 2019 that violated EU standards and democratic practice.

Mr. Duda told The Times that the Law and Justice party’s political program “is based, to a large extent, on what I would call traditional values.”

“I feel that this is the Republican program in the deepest sense of the word,” he said. “Maybe this will make it easier for an American audience to understand.”

Polish conservatives “believe that we are adhering to the values on which the European Union is based …,” he said, “values that were at the foundation of the success enjoyed by the EU at its strongest when it was the union of free nations and equal states.”

“If the EU becomes a concert of powers,” he said, “it will become weaker.”

The Polish president rebutted the narrative that the U.S. commitment to NATO is faltering. Critics fear such a trend would rapidly accelerate if Republican candidate Donald Trump returns to the White House.

Mr. Duda said the U.S. remains the indispensable cog of the alliance, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary.

“To me, it is most important that this anniversary NATO summit is taking place in Washington because this demonstrates who the most important entity is,” he said. “The one who is the strongest hosts the anniversary summit. … Nobody protested against that in NATO.”

Mr. Duda suggested that Mr. Trump’s hardball rhetoric on NATO member defense spending has strengthened the alliance.

Poland has responded to the Ukraine-Russia war by dramatically beefing up its military. Warsaw spends more than 4% of its gross domestic product on defense, a greater per capita ratio than any other NATO nation, including the United States.

Mr. Duda said Poland was among just five NATO member states meeting the alliance’s goal of spending 2% of GDP on defense when he came to power. “Today, we have 23 such states within NATO,” he said.

He expressed gratitude that President Biden has kept a promise to deploy American troops to Poland.

“We do appreciate it and are very grateful … and we deeply believe in our alliance and our friendship with Americans,” Mr. Duda said. “I had good cooperation with President Barack Obama, also with President Donald Trump in his first term, and I have got very good cooperation with President Joe Biden right now.”

A ‘more brutal’ Russia

Mr. Duda was most passionate when asked about Russia’s grave threats and the prospect of ceding pieces of Ukrainian territory to Moscow as part of a broader deal to end the war, now in its third year.

He said Mr. Putin’s “reborn Russian imperialism” invites comparisons to Soviet-era aggression when Poland was caught on the Soviet side of the Cold War global divide.

“Soviet Russia was baring its teeth, but it did not dare attack openly any Western country,” he said. “But now we have a situation in which Putin’s Russia has attacked in a very brutal, aggressive and full-scale way an independent, sovereign state of Ukraine.”

“In the times of the Cold War, Russia was deploying nuclear weapons in its sphere of influence, including Poland and also in East Germany,” Mr. Duda said.

“In the same way today, Russia is speaking about deploying nuclear weapons to Belarus, and it is building up its military potential in Kaliningrad oblast,” he said, referring to the small Russian-controlled enclave between Lithuania and Poland and across from Sweden on the Baltic Sea.

For Poland, that necessitates even deeper security cooperation with Ukraine.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Warsaw on Monday to discuss expanding Western military support for Kyiv ahead of the NATO summit. Mr. Zelenskyy said he sees an opportunity for partner nations to use their air defense systems to take down Russian missiles fired into Ukraine.

Other regional stakeholders appear to be pushing an alternative agenda to end the fighting as soon as possible, and the prospect of Ukrainian territorial concessions has appeared to gain steam.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban recently traveled to Kyiv, Moscow and Beijing to publicly call for an end to the war. In the U.S., Mr. Trump has vowed to end the conflict quickly if elected president, and some figures in his national security orbit have suggested that Ukrainian land concessions may need to be part of a cease-fire deal.

Ukraine’s eventual accession to NATO could also be discussed during peace negotiations. A promise to keep Ukraine out of the alliance is viewed as a major olive branch to persuade Mr. Putin to embrace a cease-fire.

Mr. Duda rejected such conditions and said Ukraine doesn’t need a “bridge” to eventual membership. It needs a formal invitation now, he said, arguing that Poland’s front-row seat to the war gives a special insight into the crisis.

“And that is why I’m saying Ukraine should be admitted as soon as possible to NATO as a fully fledged member,” he said. “I believe that Ukraine should be formally invited to become a member of NATO.”