Did former Polish president Lech Wałęsa write a letter to President Donald Trump expressing "fear and distaste" at his February 2025 meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy? Yes, that's true: On March 3, 2025, Wałęsa shared these sentiments in a post published on Facebook.
An English-translated version of the original post in Polish appeared on Facebook on March 3, 2025, with a caption that read in part:
Former President of Poland Lech Walesa wrote the following letter to Trump.
Your Excellency, Mr. President,
We watched the report of your conversation with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, with fear and distaste.
Below is how the post appeared on Facebook at the time of this writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken Tue Mar 4 06:54:21 2025 UTC)
Translated versions of the post include variations of "fear and distaste," such as "horror and disgust," but the core of the message remains the same.
Wałęsa published the original post on March 3, 2025. When translated with Google Translate, it read:
After the US decision to suspend supplies to Ukraine, if the answer were in my hands, it would be "Let's do our thing", not a step back. AMEN.
We signed the following text:
Dear Mr. President,
We watched the report of your conversation with the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky with horror and distaste. We consider your expectations regarding showing respect and gratitude for the material assistance provided by the United States to Ukraine fighting against Russia to be offensive. Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed blood in defense of the values of the free world. They are the ones who have been dying on the front lines for over 11 years in the name of these values and the independence of their homeland attacked by Putin's Russia.
We do not understand how the leader of a country that is a symbol of the free world can not see this.
We were also horrified by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of the one we remember well from interrogations by the Security Service and from the courtrooms in communist courts. Prosecutors and judges, commissioned by the all-powerful communist political police, also explained to us that they held all the cards and we held none. They demanded that we cease our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people were suffering because of us. They deprived us of our freedom and civil rights because we did not agree to cooperate with the authorities and did not show them gratitude. We are shocked that you treated President Volodymyr Zelensky in a similar way.
The history of the 20th century shows that every time the United States wanted to maintain a distance from democratic values and its European allies, it ended up being a threat to itself. President Woodrow Wilson understood this, deciding that the United States would enter World War I in 1917. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this, deciding after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that the war in defense of America would be fought not only in the Pacific, but also in Europe, in alliance with the countries attacked by the Third Reich.
We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and American financial involvement, the collapse of the Soviet Union empire would not have been possible. President Reagan was aware that millions of enslaved people were suffering in Soviet Russia and the countries it conquered, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their sacrifice in defense of democratic values with their freedom. His greatness consisted, among other things, in the fact that he did not hesitate to call the USSR the "Evil Empire" and gave it a decisive fight. We won, and today a monument to President Ronald Reagan stands in Warsaw opposite the US Embassy.
Mr. President, material aid - military and financial - cannot be an equivalent for the blood shed in the name of independence and freedom of Ukraine, Europe, and the entire free world. Human life is priceless, its value cannot be measured in money. Gratitude is due to those who make the sacrifice of blood and freedom. For us, the people of "Solidarity", former political prisoners of the communist regime serving Soviet Russia, this is obvious.
We call on the United States to honour the guarantees it and Great Britain gave in the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, which explicitly stipulates a commitment to defend the inviolability of Ukraine's borders in exchange for Ukraine's surrender of its nuclear weapons. These guarantees are unconditional: there is not a word about treating such aid as economic exchange e.
Wałęsa was one of dozens of Polish former political prisoners who signed off on the latter, The Guardian reported.
Wałęsa was president of the Republic of Poland from 1990 to 1995. According to the World Summit of Nobel Laureates for Peace, he "was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 for his efforts to resolve the nation's problems through negotiations and working together without violence."
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