Former President of Poland Lech Wałęsa wrote the following letter to Donald Trump (3/3/25):
Dear Mr. President,
We watched with horror and dismay the report of your conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. We find your expectations of respect and gratitude for the material aid provided by the United States to Ukraine in its fight against Russia to be offensive. Gratitude is owed to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who are shedding their blood in defense of the values of the free world. For more than 11 years, they have been dying on the front lines in the name of these values and the independence of their homeland, attacked by Putin’s Russia.
We do not understand how the leader of a country that symbolizes the free world can fail to see this.
We were also horrified that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of what we remember well from interrogations by the Security Service and courtrooms in communist trials. Prosecutors and judges, acting on the orders of the all-powerful communist political police, also explained to us that they held all the cards while we held none. They demanded that we cease our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people were suffering because of us. They deprived us of freedom and civil rights because we refused to cooperate with the authorities and did not show them gratitude. We are shocked that you treated President Volodymyr Zelensky in a similar manner.
The history of the 20th century shows that every time the United States sought to distance itself from democratic values and its European allies, it resulted in a threat to the U.S. itself. President Woodrow Wilson understood this when he decided in 1917 that the United States would enter World War I. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood it when, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he decided that America’s war would be fought not only in the Pacific but also in Europe, in alliance with the countries attacked by the Third Reich.
We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and American financial involvement, the collapse of the Soviet empire would not have been possible. President Reagan was aware that in Soviet Russia and the countries it had subjugated, millions of enslaved people suffered, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their commitment to democratic values with their freedom. His greatness lay, among other things, in the fact that he unhesitatingly called the USSR the "Evil Empire" and waged a determined battle against it. We prevailed, and today, a monument to President Ronald Reagan stands in Warsaw, directly opposite the U.S. embassy.
Mr. President, material aid—both military and financial—cannot be considered equivalent to the blood spilled in the name of the independence and freedom of Ukraine, Europe, and the entire free world. Human life is priceless; its value cannot be measured in money. Gratitude is due to those who make sacrifices of blood and freedom. For us, the people of "Solidarity," former political prisoners of the communist regime that served Soviet Russia, this is self-evident.
We appeal for the United States to fulfill the guarantees it provided, along with the United Kingdom, in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which they explicitly committed to defending the inviolability of Ukraine’s borders in exchange for Ukraine surrendering its nuclear arsenal. These guarantees are unconditional: there is not a single word in the agreement about treating such assistance as a business transaction.
