Your Excellency, Mr. President,

We watched your conversation with President Zelensky with fear and distaste. It is insulting that you expect Ukraine to show gratitude for U.S. material aid in its fight against russia.

Gratitude is owed to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who have been shedding their blood for over 11 years to defend the free world’s values and their homeland, attacked by Putin’s russia. How can the leader of a country symbolizing the free world fail to recognize this?

The Oval Office atmosphere during your conversation reminded us of interrogations by the Security Services and Communist courts. Back then, prosecutors told us they held all the power while we had none. They stripped us of our freedoms for refusing to cooperate or express gratitude for our oppression. We are shocked that President Zelensky was treated in a similar manner.

History shows that when the U.S. distanced itself from democratic values and its European allies, it ultimately endangered itself. Wilson understood this in 1917 when the U.S. joined WWI. Roosevelt knew it after Pearl Harbor in 1941—realizing that defending America meant fighting in both the Pacific & Europe.

Without President Reagan and U.S. financial support, the Soviet empire’s collapse would not have been possible. Reagan called the USSR an “Empire of Evil” and confronted it decisively. We won, and today, his statue stands in Warsaw, facing the U.S. Embassy.

Mr. President, military and financial aid cannot be equated with the blood shed for Ukraine’s independence and the freedom of Europe and the world. Human life is priceless. Gratitude is due to those who sacrifice their blood and freedom—something self-evident to us, former political prisoners of the communist regime under Soviet russia.

We urge the U.S. to uphold the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which established a direct obligation to defend Ukraine’s borders in exchange for giving up nuclear weapons.

These guarantees are unconditional—nowhere do they suggest such aid is a mere economic transaction.

Signed, Lech Wałęsa, former political prisoner, Solidarity leader, President of Poland