President Andrzej Duda is participating in the Ministerial Council of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which began on Thursday in Łódź. At the inauguration of the meeting, the President spoke about the Russian aggression against Ukraine.

“I regret that strenuous efforts to prevent Russian aggression against Ukraine have not been successful. With the perspective of time, we know that the decision to invade Ukraine, a free sovereign, independent state, was made in Moscow in the Kremlin and nothing within our power as the OSCE community, the international community, was able to change it”, Andrzej Duda assessed.

The Polish leader added that Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine dominated the period of the Polish chairmanship of the OSCE, putting aside any other goals set when the chairmanship began.

“Unfortunately, Russia, one of the OSCE’s Member States, brutally violated all the rules. There is no doubt that this is a criminal state whose policies cannot be agreed with and whose words cannot be believed”, the President stressed.

Andrzej Duda called for the Russian aggression not to be ignored and for the planned murder of civilians or the abduction of Ukrainian children not to be forgotten.

‘I am afraid that the moment we start treating Russian bestialities as something normal, it will be tantamount to the victory of what we call “Russian mir”, meaning brutality, aggression, war, poverty and death’, the president added.

The OSCE brings together 57 states. The organisation traces its origins to the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Helsinki in 1975. The formal decision to transform the CSCE into the OSCE was taken at the 1994 Budapest Conference.

In Łódź, Poland will symbolically pass on the chairmanship to North Macedonia, which will lead the work of the Organisation in 2023.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński