WARSAW (Reuters) -Polish President Karol Nawrocki took part in a teleconference on Ukraine with U.S. President Donald Trump and European leaders on Wednesday, his office said, a call his bitter political rival Prime Minister Donald Tusk had been expected to attend.
Nawrocki, a conservative nationalist and eurosceptic, is an ally of Trump’s MAGA movement and visited the White House during Poland’s presidential election campaign this year. He defeated the candidate of Tusk’s party in a run-off vote.
A government spokesperson had said on Tuesday that Tusk, a former head of the European Council of leaders, would attend the call with Trump.
“Karol Nawrocki was invited to the talks with President Trump and other leaders of European countries,” his foreign policy adviser Marcin Przydacz told reporters. “I have no information that Prime Minister Donald Tusk had previously planned to participate.”
He said the fact that Tusk’s team thought he would take part showed they did not have good contacts with the Trump administration.
Government spokesman Adam Szlapka said Tusk was representing Poland in two separate calls taking place on Wednesday and involving European leaders but not Trump. Przydacz said that president’s and prime minister’s offices would exchange information about the meetings.
European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy spoke to Trump during a day of frenetic diplomacy ahead of the U.S. president’s summit with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, stressing the need to protect Kyiv’s interests.
Krzysztof Izdebski, policy director at the Batory Foundation, said the fact that two political opponents were both representing Poland created a risk of mixed messages.
“This shows that, even in foreign policy, in such a key issue of security, we are simply hostage to internal politics and a certain competition between various state bodies,” he said.
“In the current international circumstances, this means that the image of Poland as a modern country that would also like to maintain a high position in international politics will, unfortunately, be weak.”
Nawrocki and PiS are strong supporters of Ukraine in its war with invading Russian forces, as is Tusk and his centrist government.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish, Barbara Erling; Editing by Gareth Jones and Alex Richardson)
