Russia planned ‘acts of terror’, says Warsaw

(Keystone-ATS) Mr. Tusk made these statements in the presence of the president of neighboring Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, who was traveling to Warsaw for a series of interviews, a few days before the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Poland, a member of the EU and NATO, has been one of kyiv’s main allies against the Russian army since the start of the invasion of Ukrainian territory in February 2022.

“Without going into detail, I can confirm the validity of the fears that Russia has planned acts of terror in the air, not only against Poland, but also against airlines around the world,” Mr. . Tusk during a joint press briefing with his Ukrainian guest.

According to him, “the acts of sabotage, the different versions of the war that Russia has declared on the entire civilized world, and not only on Ukraine, make joint action necessary.”

In November, Lithuania made arrests as part of a criminal investigation into the presence of incendiary devices on board planes bound for Western countries.

According to Polish and Lithuanian media, these devices, including electric massagers impregnated with a flammable substance, were sent from Lithuania to the United Kingdom in July and could be the cause of the fire in a truck in outside Warsaw.

A security adviser to the Lithuanian presidency assured at the time that Moscow had been at the origin of these incidents.

In October, British counter-terrorism police announced they were investigating how a package caught fire in a depot earlier this year, after a similar case in Germany was blamed on Russia.

“Getting out of the impasse”

Mr. Tusk, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, promised to do everything to “break the deadlock” of “the last few months” in Ukraine’s EU integration process.

“We will work with Ukraine and our European partners, without preconditions, to accelerate the accession process as much as possible,” he stressed.

“The sooner Ukraine is in the EU, the sooner Ukraine becomes a member of NATO, the more we act together, the sooner the whole of Europe will obtain the geopolitical certainty it needs,” he said. his side hammered Mr. Zelensky.

“Russia will not go where there is our integration, our common strength,” he added, also calling on his Western allies to spend 250 billion dollars of frozen Russian assets in order to buy weapons for his country.

The Ukrainian president has increased his meetings with kyiv’s supporters before the return next week to the White House of Donald Trump, who has promised to quickly end the fighting as soon as he takes office. This makes Ukraine fear that it will be forced to make major territorial concessions in exchange for peace.

The Ukrainian head of state met in Warsaw with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda who reiterated his opinion that “no discussion concerning Ukraine, the end of the war, the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine can have place without the participation of Ukraine.

“Problem to be solved”

MM. Tusk and Zelensky further spoke about settling a decades-old dispute over the World War II massacres of Poles in Volyn, a city now in western Ukraine.

With the presidential election in May in its sights, the pro-EU alliance that governs Poland is under pressure from nationalists to obtain the exhumation of the victims of these killings.

“There is a fairly obvious problem to be resolved, namely the need of Polish families to bury with dignity their loved ones who were victims of the Volyn massacre,” said Mr. Tusk.

“The fact that we understood each other on this issue, that we started talking about it normally and that we took certain steps, yes, that deserves to be called a breakthrough,” he said.

Neither side specified what concrete actions had been taken.