“My mission to the government has been completed. For a moment, I was hoping that this war would last shorter”, said Jarosław Kaczyński in an interview.

On June 21, Jarosław Kaczyński resigned as deputy prime minister and as head of the Committee for National Security and Defense Affairs. He admitted that combining the functions of deputy prime minister and party leader was difficult.

“I was supposed to be in charge shorter, for 16 months for preparing and pushing through the laws. One of them, about defending the Fatherland, was difficult even for the government because it is very expensive. Here the war helped us, so it was very easy to do. Those who claim today that I fled the government because of the war forget that they voted for this law, but the war had just broken out and I had to stay longer”, explained Kaczyński.

He recalled that his brother, President Lech Kaczyński, had repeatedly warned against the Russian threat. In August 2008, he said in Tbilisi about the Russian invasion: “Today Georgia, tomorrow Ukraine, the day after tomorrow the Baltic states, and then maybe it’s time for my country, for Poland!”

“Now these prophetic words have turned into deeds, and we are watching it beyond our eastern border. Ukraine fights in an unprecedented way, arouses great admiration by resisting the aggressor”, said Jarosław Kaczyński and stressed that Ukraine is an independent country and no one has the right to impose their claims on it.

In his opinion, “this David, that is Ukraine, can win with Goliath, but only if he has slings and stones”. Therefore, he once again called on Western countries to act with full determination and to take bold decisions.

Mariusz Błaszczak, the Minister of National Defense, will become the new deputy prime minister and head of the Committee for National Security and Defense Affairs. Ongoing supervision over the work of the Committee will now be exercised by its current secretary, Zbigniew Hoffmann, a deputy head of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister.

Adrian Andrzejewski