Polish PM says EU will break Kiev aid deadlock with or without Hungary, Ukraine region to remove all Soviet-era relics

Speaking ahead of a key meeting on the conflict in Ukraine, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on January 30 that the European Union (EU) should find ways to continue supporting Ukraine, regardless of Hungary's opinion.

Thủ tướng Ba Lan Donald Tusk. (Nguồn: EPA/EFE)

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. (Source: EPA/EFE)

According to Strait Times , Prime Minister Tusk told reporters: "One way or another, we will find a solution, with or without Hungary, to support Ukraine." The EU is expected to meet this week to find a solution to the disagreement regarding support for Ukraine. Previously, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has close relations with Russia, had vetoed the EU's 50 billion Euro (54.2 billion USD) support package for Ukraine.

Populist leaders across Europe, including in Slovakia and Hungary, have condemned Russia’s extraordinary military campaign in Ukraine and Kiev’s urgent request for tens of billions of euros in aid. However, only Budapest has vetoed the latest EU aid package.

Mr Tusk, a former president of the European Council, called Prime Minister Orban “the openly anti-Ukrainian leader” in the bloc. The Polish prime minister also said he would speak to his Slovak counterpart Robert Fico ahead of the upcoming summit.

Reuters reported that on March 30, the governor of Ukraine's Lvov province, Maksym Kozytskyi, announced that the province had become the first locality in the country to remove all Soviet-era monuments, part of efforts to completely erase all traces of Russian rule.

Ukraine launched a “decommunization” campaign after the 2014 revolution that ousted a pro-Moscow president and has continued the movement as an effort to counter Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, now in its third year.

“Not a single kopek from the regional budget is spent to overthrow these ‘idols’,” Mr Kozytskyi wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

He showed a picture of a demolished concrete statue whose identity was not immediately known. Thousands of streets and settlements in Ukraine, which declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, have also been renamed in recent years as part of the joint effort.

Governor Maksym Kozytskyi said 312 monuments were removed by activists and local residents in 2023 in Lvov, a province in western Ukraine that borders Poland.

Last week, the mayor of Kharkov, Ukraine’s second-largest city, proposed renaming Pushkin Street in the city center after a famous Ukrainian philosopher. Meanwhile, last month, authorities in the Ukrainian capital Kiev removed a statue of a Red Army commander from a central avenue.

Source