By Barbara Erling and Anna Koper
WARSAW (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump at the last minute requested MAGA-allied Polish President Karol Nawrocki join the Ukraine teleconference with European leaders on Wednesday, according to centrist Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Nawrocki’s bitter political rival who had been expected to attend.
Nawrocki, a conservative nationalist and eurosceptic, is an ally of Trump’s right-wing populist MAGA political movement and visited the White House during Poland’s presidential election campaign this year. He defeated the candidate of Tusk’s pro-European, centrist party in June.
“Just before midnight yesterday we received information, alongside our European partners, that the American side would prefer that Poland was represented by the president in contacts with President Trump,” Tusk told a news conference.
The White House did not comment whether the U.S. requested Nawrocki rather than Tusk take part in the call.
A Polish government spokesperson said on Tuesday that Tusk, a former head of the European Council of leaders, would attend the call with Trump.
But Nawrocki foreign policy adviser Marcin Przydacz told reporters he had “no information that Prime Minister Donald Tusk had previously planned to participate.”
He said Tusk’s team showed it did not have good contacts with the Trump administration because it was under the impression Tusk would take part.
Government spokesman Adam Szlapka said Tusk was representing Poland in two calls on Wednesday with European leaders but not Trump. Przydacz said the offices of the president and prime minister would exchange information about the meetings.
European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy spoke to Trump ahead of the U.S. president’s summit with 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 having two political opponents represent 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.
He said this would undermine Poland’s effort to present itself as a modern country working with leading nations on international political issues.
Nawrocki and PiS are strong supporters of Ukraine in its war with invading Russian forces, as is Tusk and his government, but they differ on issues such as abortion, family values and the rule of law.
Tusk said that he respected the U.S. request to keep contacts at the presidential level, but this should not be used to “play Poles against each other”.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish, Barbara Erling, Anna Koper, Marek Strzelecki; Editing by Gareth Jones, Alex Richardson and Cynthia Osterman)
