On Monday 12 February, Prime Minister Donald Tusk first visited Paris, where he met with French President Emanuel Macron, and then travelled to Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“Our continent must become a safe place. We must be able to defend our own territory. It is here in Paris that the words resonate most clearly: One for all, all for one”, said Prime Minister Tusk and added that “there is no alternative to the European Union and there is no alternative to NATO”.

„France and Poland are preparing to open a new chapter in their relationship, drafting a new bilateral treaty to replace the one of 1991. This treaty will define a new framework for our cooperation in all areas: defence, nuclear energy, scientific, linguistic, cultural cooperation”, President Macron revealed.

Prime Minister Tusk stressed that it is important to send a common signal to Europe and the entire West that “we are ready for full solidarity in all situations, even the most difficult ones. I am glad that also here we are renewing the Weimar Triangle in some sense”, he said.

In the evening, the Polish Prime Minister arrived in Berlin.

“We talked about the most important need, which is the security of our homelands, all of Europe and all our allies”, said Prime Minister Tusk after his meeting with Chancellor Scholz. The head of the Polish government stressed that Warsaw and Berlin, as well as Paris, must jointly proclaim the need for the countries of the European Union and NATO to rearm.

“Unlike my predecessors, I will seek together with Chancellor Scholz such forms of cooperation that will not turn the past into some kind of fatality that would weigh down on our relations”, Prime Minister Tusk said at the conference, responding to a question on war reparations from Germany. It is true that “in a formal, legal, international sense, the issue of reparations was closed many years ago”, but Tusk noted that “the issue of moral, financial, material reparations has never been realised”.

Adrian Andrzejewski