Ukraine war - Polish, Czech and Slovenian Prime Ministers visit Kiev
Lucie Szymanowska, MTI correspondent:
Warsaw, Tuesday March 15, 2022 (MTI) -
"Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa and Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski will visit the Ukrainian capital Kiev on Tuesday to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Prime Minister Denis Smihal, the Office of the Prime Minister in Warsaw said.
According to the statement, the politicians are travelling to Kiev on behalf of the European Council, having previously discussed the trip with Charles Michel, President of the European Council, and Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, and informed international society through international organisations, including the UN.
The aim of the visit was to reaffirm the European Union's "unequivocal support for Ukraine's sovereignty and independence" and to present a broad package of support for the Ukrainian state and society, they said.
At a press briefing on Tuesday morning, Michal Dworczyk, head of the Polish Prime Minister's Office, said the four politicians would travel to the Ukrainian capital by train and had already crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border.
Dworczyk said that the trip had been decided in advance at the European Council meeting in Paris last week and that Polish diplomats had informed the heads of NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), as well as the UN.
The visit was later reported by Morawiecki himself on his Facebook page. At such crucial moments for the world, "it is our duty to be where history is being made," he wrote. In the war in Ukraine, "the future of our children is at stake, they deserve to live in a world free from tyranny," the post reads.
"Today it is Georgia, tomorrow Ukraine, the day after tomorrow the Baltic States, and later it could be my country, Poland," the prime minister quoted Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president who died in the Smolensk air disaster in 2010, as saying, "during the Russian attack on Georgia in 2008, he was in Tbilisi on a solidarity visit with the then leaders of the three Baltic States and Ukraine."
Tuesday, 15 March 2022 10:08 MTI