Legendary Polish anti-Communist Lech Wałęsa has slammed Donald Trump’s Oval Office attack on Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, comparing it to Soviet secret police tactics.
Wałęsa, 81, signed a letter along with 38 other Poles who had been held captive by the Communist regime, telling Trump that the Friday spectacle filled them “with horror and distaste.”
The former Polish president previously revealed that he met Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2010, and attached a photo of the two of them to the letter, which he posted on Facebook on Monday.
The letter was signed by Wałęsa and 38 former Polish political prisoners, who said “the atmosphere in the Oval Office” reminded them of “Security Service interrogations and from the courtrooms in communist courts.”
“Prosecutors and judges, commissioned by the omnipotent communist political police, also explained to us that they had all the cards in their hands, and we had none,” they write in the letter, referencing President Donald Trump’s comment that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not in a position to negotiate.
“You don’t have the cards right now,” he told Zelensky during their tense Oval Office meeting.
Wałęsa’s and the other signatories said they were “shocked” by Trump treatment of Zelensky, drawing parallels between the meeting and their own experiences under Poland’s former communist regime. In particular, they condemned Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s demands that Zelensky express more gratitude for the material assistance the U.S. has given Ukraine while it defends itself against Russia’s invasion, calling it “insulting.”
“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,” they said. “We do not understand how the leader of a country that is the symbol of the free world cannot see it.”
Wałęsa was a founder of Poland’s pro-democracy Solidarity movement when he was a shipyard worker in the port city of Gdansk. When martial law was declared in 1981, he was imprisoned for 11 months. In 1989, he negotiated with the Moscow-backed communist regime for Poland to hold parliamentary elections, which eventually led to the peaceful ouster of communism from Poland.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Price in 1983 and presided over the country’s transition to a free market liberal democracy during his term as president from 1990 to 1995.
Among the other signatories were democracy activist and historian Adam Michnik, journalist Seweryn Blumsztajn, and politician Władysław Frasyniuk.
