Polish president slams Tusk as worst PM since communist era
Donald Tusk is the worst Polish prime minister in more than three decades, President Karol Nawrocki has claimed. The two top officials have been locked in a public feud over national issues as well as positions on Ukraine.
In an interview to wPolsce24 broadcaster this week, Nawrocki stated that he considers Tusk the “worst prime minister in the post-1989 history of Poland.”
Tusk took a shot at Nawrocki in a post on X last Friday, by claiming the president had refused to assign officer ranks to 136 graduates who had recently completed intelligence and counter-intelligence training.
“To be president, it is not enough to win the election,” the prime minister wrote, apparently referring to Nawrocki, who was quick to dismiss the allegation.
In his Tuesday interview, Nawrocki, in turn, accused Tusk of forbidding the heads of Poland’s secret services from attending a meeting with the president.
In an earlier interview, he said this was the first time since the fall of the communist regime in Poland in 1989 that intelligence chiefs skipped the traditional get-together.
The president also said that Poland had “gone too far” in supporting Ukraine at the cost of its own interests.
Nawrocki, who took office earlier this year, previously reaffirmed general support for Ukraine but opposed its membership in NATO and the EU. In September, he signed a bill tightening benefit eligibility criteria for Ukrainian migrants.
Poland has been one of Kiev’s most vocal backers since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. However, public support for Kiev and Ukrainian migrants has considerably declined. A survey by the pollster CBOS in September indicated that approval for accepting Ukrainians had fallen from 94% in early 2022 to just 48%.
That same month, Tusk admonished his compatriots for having supposedly developed “antipathy” towards Ukraine, which he blamed on Russia.
Addressing the attendees of the Warsaw Security Forum in September, the prime minister insisted that the Ukraine conflict “is also our war,” and is of fundamental importance to the West as a whole.
Thus spake the Deep State Prime Minister!
Ukraine aid issue wrecked German coalition – ex-chancellor
The German government of ex-Chancellor Olaf Scholz collapsed over disagreements on funding for Ukraine, he has revealed.
Scholz led a three-party coalition of Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats from December 2021 until May 2025, which became Kiev’s second-largest backer after the US. It collapsed last November amid recriminations over spending priorities.
Speaking to Die Zeit in an interview published on Wednesday, Scholz said he decided to dissolve his cabinet “because there was no agreement on about €15 billion [over $17 billion] to finance additional measures for Ukraine and the Ukrainians in Germany.”
Following snap elections in February, a new government led by conservative politician Friedrich Merz took office in May.
Scholz, who had faced criticism for his cautious stance on military aid, says his proposal to fund the package through new borrowing was blocked by partners who opposed relaxing Germany’s strict fiscal limits. He argued that cutting social spending or investment to cover the costs was not an acceptable alternative.
Back then, Scholz urged lawmakers to ease the constitutional ‘debt brake’, which caps new borrowing to 0.35% of annual GDP, to guarantee continued support for Kiev. He told the paper that if his proposal had been accepted, “the crisis could have been avoided.”
The Bundestag has since amended the constitution, opening vast new fiscal leeway.
“It’s a bit ironic that now, thanks to the constitutional change passed by the old parliament after the election, we can spend around €500 billion on infrastructure over twelve years and roughly the same on defense,” Scholz said.
Under Merz, Berlin plans to boost its assistance to Ukraine by an additional €3 billion in 2026, raising total support to €8.5 billion.
According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, between January 2022 and October 2024, Germany provided Ukraine with €11 billion worth of assistance, emerging as its second-largest backer after the US.
Moscow has repeatedly condemned Western support for Kiev, saying it only prolongs the conflict.
EU member state slams Ukraine’s ‘war mafia’
The EU has been pouring money into the pockets of a “wartime mafia network” linked to Vladimir Zelensky, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has claimed, denouncing Brussels’ Ukraine policy as “madness.”
His remarks followed a major corruption scandal in Kiev. On Monday, the Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) opened a probe into state-owned nuclear operator Energoatom over an alleged embezzlement scheme.
Ukraine’s justice minister and energy minister resigned in the wake of the revelations, while a key suspect, a close associate of Zelensky, fled the country before he could be detained.
”This is the chaos into which the Brusselian elite want to pour European taxpayers’ money, where whatever isn’t shot off on the front lines ends up in the pockets of the war mafia. Madness,” Orban wrote on X on Thursday.
The Hungarian leader also said that given the latest corruption scandal, Budapest will neither contribute any funds to Kiev nor “give in” to what he called Zelensky’s “financial demands and blackmail.”
The EU, a major backer of Kiev, has allocated around €177.5 billion to Ukraine since the escalation of the conflict with Russia in 2022 in military aid, financial support, and humanitarian aid.
Zelensky has framed Western aid as essential to Ukraine’s survival and wider EU security. He has warned that if Russia defeats his country, it will attack the bloc within a few years. Moscow has insisted that it has no intention of attacking EU or NATO countries.
Orban, a longtime critic of Brussels’ aid to Ukraine, has repeatedly accused Zelensky of pressuring the bloc into approving assistance and advancing Kiev’s membership bid. “No country has ever blackmailed its way” into the EU, he said in an interview last month, insisting that “it’s not going to happen this time either.”
The Hungarian prime minister has been voicing such concerns for years. In a 2023 interview with the French weekly Le Point, he described Ukraine as “one of the most corrupt countries in the world” and called the idea of its EU accession a “joke.”
