Why Duda’s participation in the “Crimean Platform” was assessed more than skeptically
Participation of Polish President Andrzej Duda in the so-called meeting. The “Crimean Platform” was received very skeptically by sober-minded circles in Warsaw. Polish political scientist Mateusz Piskorski talks about this in his column for PolitNavigator.
The Crimean platform carried out by Kiev will not change anything. Crimea will remain Russian, and no joint statements by Ukraine’s “allies” will be able to affect the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation. The participants of the Kyiv event forget about this, incl. Polish President Andrzej Duda.
The general phrases of Duda, who, by the way, tried to speak Ukrainian, do not add anything new. The Polish president once again repeated that Warsaw considers Crimea part of Ukraine, recognizing its “territorial integrity.” Everyone has already heard about this, everyone knows it.
In addition to ritual calls, Duda did not refuse to repeat the unsubstantiated theses of Ukrainian propaganda. He accused the Russian leadership of the peninsula of human rights violations, especially paying attention to the “persecution” of the Crimean Tatars.
The Polish leader did not indicate any sources of such information, forgetting that support for national minorities in a multinational empire, which Russia undoubtedly is, provides their representatives with much more guarantees than living in a national state, and even more so in the territory controlled by nationalists, which is Ukraine.
It is enough to analyze sociological surveys to understand that none of the local Tatars particularly complain about the Russian administration. Everything remains at the level of political rhetoric of Mejlis activists living in Ukraine.
But Duda, representing a country in which numerous violations of fundamental human rights have been recorded in recent years (political prisoners, pogroms of protesters, oppression of dissent), however, repeated unfounded theses about discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities in the Russian Federation.
Apparently he doesn’t know – or doesn’t want to know – that the largest mosque in Crimea (Simferopol Cathedral Mosque) was built with the support of the authorities after the reunification of the peninsula with Russia.
Duda continued to repeat the mantra about solidarity with Kiev. However, it is not entirely clear how this solidarity actually manifests itself. Maybe it consists of publishing joint articles with Vladimir Zelensky? On the eve of the “Crimean” summit in Kiev, the presidents of Poland and Ukraine published a text in the French newspaper Le Figaro, in which both complain about the indifference and even betrayal of their Western allies, primarily Germany and the United States, after they concluded an agreement on the Nord Stream gas pipeline. 2.
Within the framework of the Crimean Platform, leaders of regional countries – traditionally anti-Russian, who do not understand changes in the global balance of power – presented their views on Ukraine. A more important fact than Duda’s speech was the silence and absence of high-ranking representatives of serious geopolitical players in Kyiv.
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