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General Assembly: 59th plenary meeting, 79th session
Noting that recent years have demonstrated how fragile peace and security are, Duda spotlighted the resurgence of “Russian imperialism”. The 2014 attack on Ukraine marked “just the beginning of an effort to violently destroy the international order”, he said.
Detailing Poland’s security cooperation, he pointed to the United States missile base in Redzikowo — an example of the “American security umbrella over Europe” — as well as recent talks with United States President Donald J. Trump. Poland is also active in collective security systems and UN peacekeeping missions, and he also highlighted the Three Seas Initiative, which aims to improve connectivity among 13 countries across Central and Eastern Europe. “Poland has never imposed its views on anyone” or colonized another country, he went on to say.
Recalling his country’s long history, he invoked the construction of a powerful seventeenth-century State, gradual partitions, loss of independence, a 123-year-long independence struggle, the achievement of independence in 1918 and the destruction of that independence “by the two totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century: Russian communism and German Nazism”.
In the last 30 years of Poland’s history — after it broke free from the Russian Federation’s sphere of influence — it transformed from a backward, poor country with high unemployment into a highly developed State and the twenty-first largest economy in the world, he pointed out. “Only peace can provide optimal conditions for development,” he said, adding that it is necessary to defend peace with real force.
The representative of the Russian Federation, taking the floor under a point of order after the address, said that his delegation “had doubts” regarding the expediency of conducting today’s meeting. “The President of Poland spent a lot of time on debating our country,” he said, adding that — although the Council adopted a text calling for peace between the Russian Federation and Ukraine — one of Poland’s leaders “talked about the logic of military focus” and providing support to Ukraine.
