FILE - Poland's former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Lech Walesa, is greeted at parliament in Warsaw, Poland, Dec. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski, File)
FILE - Poland's former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Lech Walesa, is greeted at parliament in Warsaw, Poland, Dec. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski, File)
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland's democracy hero Lech Wałęsa and dozens of other former political prisoners in Poland have written a letter to President Donald Trump, telling him that his treatment of Ukraine's president at the Oval Office last week filled them “with horror and distaste.”
Wałęsa, who served as president soon after Poland embraced democracy, and the others tell Trump that they found it offensive that he expected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to show respect and gratitude for the material assistance the United States has given Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia's invasion.
“Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed blood in defense of the values of the free world. They are the ones who have been dying on the front lines," they say.
The White House has demanded that Zelenskyy show more openness to potential concessions in order to bring the fighting to an end, but Zelenskyy has been resistant, saying Monday that any deal with Russia is still “very, very far away," while seeking greater security guarantees from Washington.
Wałęsa posted the letter on Facebook on Monday along with a photograph of himself with Trump. It was signed by himself and 38 other former democracy activists who were imprisoned by Poland's Moscow-backed communist regime before 1989. Among the others who signed are Adam Michnik, Bogdan Lis, Seweryn Blumsztajn and Władysław Frasyniuk.
“We were also terrified by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of the one we remember well from interrogations by the Security Service and from the courtrooms in communist courts," they wrote.
"Prosecutors and judges, commissioned by the omnipotent communist political police, also explained to us that they had all the cards in their hands, and we had 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 did not agree to cooperate with the authorities and did not show them gratitude. We are shocked that you treated President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a similar way,” they wrote.
Starting in 1980, Wałęsa spearheaded Poland’s pro-democracy Solidarity movement that nine years later led to the peaceful ouster of communism from Poland and inspired other countries to shed Moscow’s domination.
In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1990-95 he served as democratic Poland’s first popularly elected president.
