Poland and Ukraine - Thirty Years of Partnership and Friendship
18.05.2022
On 18 May 2022, we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty on Good Neighbourliness, Friendly Relations and Cooperation between Poland and Ukraine. Given our centuries of shared history, close cultural affinities and long-lasting social bonds, along with common and complementary interests in the face of security challenges in Central and Eastern Europe, no-one in Warsaw or Kyiv doubted back in the early 1990s that the only way forward for Poland and Ukraine was a strategic partnership between our two countries. Hence, Poland was the first country to recognise Ukraine’s declaration of independence, showing solidarity with a state that was just embarking on its path to freedom and democracy.
The Treaty’s signing opened the way to an intensive dialogue and cooperation in the fields of politics, commerce, defence, culture, sports and many other areas, both at the parliamentary, governmental, and local levels. Institutional forms of cooperation were established in every area of state activity, including the Presidential Advisory Committee, the Polish-Ukrainian Parliamentary Assembly, and several intergovernmental commissions and councils attached to various ministries, such as the Intergovernmental Commission for Economic Cooperation and the Intergovernmental Coordination Council for Interregional Cooperation. The Polish-Ukrainian Standing Conference on European Integration deserves special mention for allowing Poland to share lessons learned from its own accession to the EU. Forums for non-governmental cooperation were also important. Jointly organising the EURO 2012 Football Championship was not just of symbolic but also of practical importance, showing the measurable results of bilateral cooperation and how sports and culture can serve as bonding agents for good neighbourly relations.
The Treaty helped foster person-to-person ties, creating a huge potential for genuine friendships between ordinary people and the Polish and the Ukrainian nations. Its effects are particularly evident today, when Poles eagerly rushed to help when their neighbours were attacked by the Russian aggressor, inviting them into their homes, providing the basic necessities, helping at border crossings, in refugee centres, supporting and organising many charity campaigns. The Polish government, for its part, has consistently supported this policy of uniting our two societies, in peacetime and now in war, by creating systemic solutions to ensure safe haven for Ukrainian refugees, offering them accommodation, food, social benefits, medical assistance, free education to children and college students, legal employment. Government assistance in building bridges between societies has for years had a systemic dimension, including such initiatives as the Youth Exchange Council, government-financed scholarship programs, visa-free travel, and the opening of Poland’s labour market to Ukrainians. These programmes, which operated for years before the war, have fostered an unprecedented scale of direct contact between Poles and Ukrainians.
For the past 30 years, Poland has remained one of the most devoted supporters of Ukraine’s European and Euro-Atlantic aspirations. Warsaw favoured the prospect of Ukraine’s candidacy for EU membership long before Russia’s brutal attack. Because it understood the nature of the eastern threat, Poland has always supported the modernization of Ukraine’s army and stronger NATO cooperation with Kyiv. Poland actively supported the democratic and pro-European aspirations of Ukrainian society by engaging in difficult mediations between the authorities and the opposition and providing humanitarian assistance, both during the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity on Maidan in February 2014.
We are starting a new decade of Polish-Ukrainian cooperation at an unusual and difficult juncture, amid a cruel war started by Russia. Secure in the knowledge that we are bound by strong neighbourly bonds in many areas, benefiting from well-established channels of dialogue and bilateral cooperation, we will strive above all to preserve the stability and security of our two countries as priority values.