Dear Mr. President,

We watched the account of your conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with horror and disgust. Your expectations regarding the expression of respect and gratitude for the material assistance provided by the United States to Ukraine, which is fighting against Russia, we consider offensive. Gratitude is owed to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who are shedding blood in defense of the values of the free world. They have been dying on the front lines for over 11 years in the name of these values and the independence of their homeland, which has been attacked by Putin’s Russia.

We do not understand how a leader of a country that is a symbol of the free world can fail to see this.

Our horror was also triggered by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of what we remember well from interrogations by the Security Service and from courtrooms in communist courts. Prosecutors and judges, at the behest of the all-powerful communist political police, also explained to us that they held all the cards, while we held none. They demanded that we cease our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people were suffering because of us. They deprived us of our freedom and civil rights because we refused to cooperate with the authorities and did not show them gratitude. We are shocked that you treated President Volodymyr Zelensky in a similar manner.

The history of the 20th century shows that every time the United States wanted to maintain distance from democratic values and its European allies, it ended up posing a threat to themselves. President Woodrow Wilson understood this when he decided to join the United States in World War I in 1917. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this when, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he decided that the war in defense of America would be fought not only in the Pacific but also in Europe, in alliance with the countries attacked by the Third Reich.

We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and American financial engagement, it would not have been possible to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union’s empire. President Reagan was aware that millions of enslaved people were suffering in Soviet Russia and the countries it had conquered, including thousands of political prisoners who paid with their freedom for their sacrifice in defense of democratic values. His greatness lay, among other things, in the fact that he unhesitatingly called the USSR an ‘Evil Empire’ and waged a determined fight against it. We won, and a monument to President Ronald Reagan stands today in Warsaw opposite the US embassy.

Mr. President, material assistance—military and financial—cannot be an equivalent for the blood shed in the name of the independence and freedom of Ukraine, Europe, and the entire free world. Human life is priceless; its value cannot be measured in money. Gratitude is owed to those who make the sacrifice of blood and freedom. For us, the people of ‘Solidarity,’ former political prisoners of the communist regime serving Soviet Russia, this is obvious.

We appeal for the United States to fulfill the guarantees it provided along with Great Britain in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which explicitly stated the commitment to defend the inviolability of Ukraine’s borders in exchange for its relinquishment of nuclear weapons. These guarantees are unconditional: there is not a word about treating such assistance as an economic exchange.

Lech Wałęsa, former political prisoner, leader of Solidarity, President of the Third Republic of Poland.