MOSCOW, October 23 (RIA Novosti) — In Poland, there is the snowballing scandal around the lies, which former foreign minister and the present chairman of parliament, Radoslaw Sikorski, told in an interview with American website “Politico.”
The former head of Polish diplomacy, known mainly as the main supporter of the Maidan “revolution” in Ukraine, is quoted as saying that in 2008 the then Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk discussed with Russian president Vladimir Putin a possible “division” of Ukraine between Poland and Russia. This is an outlandish “revelation,” since respect for Ukrainian sovereignty is a stated foreign policy line in both Poland and Russia. Both the Kremlin and the office of Mr. Tusk (the future head of the European Council) dismiss Mr. Sikorski’s allegations as “nonsense.”
Sikorski first said that his words were “misinterpreted” by the interviewer, a notoriously anti-Russian journalist Ben Judah, who, in Sikorski’s words, did not bother to “authorize” the conversation, obtaining Mr. Sikorski’s signature under these shameful lies. Ben Judah protested, saying that the practice of “authorizing” interviews was binding in Poland, not the United States.
Later, at a press conference hastily convened to explain himself, Sikorski stated that the meeting in 2008 between Putin and Tusk, described in the interview, actually never took place. But the Polish journalists quickly found on the Kremlin’s website an official announcement about such a meeting between the two leaders. Then Sikorski, exposed as a liar for the third time in a row in 2014 alone, started complaining about having “memory malfunctions.” The biggest opposition party “Law and Justice” demanded Sikorski’s resignation, when his conduct was discussed during a session of the country’s National Security Council.
The history of Mr. Sikorski’s statements, public and not so public (but still published) shows that if there was something in him that never failed, it was his capacity to lie. During the Maidan confrontation between December 2013 and February 2014 Poland’s foreign minister Sikorski continued talking about some “peaceful protesters” in Kiev – despite television cameras from just about all the major TV channels in the world showing Molotov cocktails, policemen burnt alive, small firing weapons used, etc.
On February 21, 2014, Sikorski was one of the three ministers of the EU member countries (France, Germany, Poland) who “guaranteed” the division of powers between the then president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich and the Maidan’s leaders. This agreement was torn to shreds the next evening, when the Maidan crowd occupied the presidential administration and the Rada, ousting Yanukovich instead of “dividing powers” with him. Mr. Sikorski, the brave “guarantor” of the agreement, did not say a single critical word for the opposition side for breaching the very agreement he was supposed to guarantee. Instead, Mr. Sikorski praised these people as “heroes of Ukraine.”
In summer, a scandal broke out when Mr. Sikorski was secretly recorded speaking to another Polish official in a quiet café not far from the Polish Sejm. During the conversation, Mr. Sikorski cynically described Polish policy in Ukraine as a “blowjob for Americans” and accused the proud Polish nation of having a “Negroid” (so he expressed himself) lack of self-esteem.
And again Russia was blamed for everything: Sikorski’s wife Anne Applebaum described the recording as “a work of Russian special services” – even though the recording was made by the owner of the café, who cooperated with the Polish authorities and who never gave any reason to suspect oneself of being “in cahoots with the Kremlin” (the favorite expression of paranoid Polish politicians suspecting “the hand of Moscow” everywhere).
Anne Applebaum, a fiery anti-Russian columnist from The Washington Post (“Nationalism is exactly What Ukraine Needs” – this is just one of her absurd and inflammatory headlines) is seen by many as “the media arm” of the Sikorski pair’s war on truth, Russia and common sense.
How could such a liar, such a cynic, such a disgrace to all of Poland become the head of the diplomatic service in this 38-million Central European nation, which has always prided itself on its quest for truth and on a long freedom-loving intellectual tradition? How can he still head the Polish parliament? Is there any chance he will survive politically even this exposure, the latest of many?
Unfortunately, experts agree that Sikorski may stay. Professor Norbert Maliszewski, an expert on political science at the University of Warsaw, notes: “Mr. Sikorski was the most trusted Polish politician in the American and European high policy circles.” “In his interview to “Politico” he described a situation that never took place, but he did not do anything that would disqualify him as a modern European politician,” professor Maliszewski added in his interview with the onet.pl news site.
So, “describing situations which never took place” (or just lying, if we use the good old language of humans, and not of European bureaucrats) – this is not something that should “disqualify” a liar as a politician in modern Europe? Sadly, this is true.
Didn’t we hear dozens of other European politicians describing the Maidan killings as “peaceful protests” (with more than 100 people killed on both sides – “revolutionaries” and police)? Did not we hear thousands of times about “Russian aggression,” with the Kiev regime never scolded for its use of cluster bombs and heavy artillery?
After that big lie, the lies of Mr. Sikorski about his “memory holes” and “having heard, but not quite” things that were never said – all of these lies indeed look puny. Let’s move on and leave Poland with this new marshal of its Sejm – certainly not the most honest in its history.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Sputnik.
