Poland aims to spend 4.7 percent of GDP on defense this year, the highest in NATO.
“The new Washington administration, once it sees how serious we are about this, will adopt a different approach, a more optimistic approach towards Ukraine,” Tusk predicted, adding: “If all the members of Europe and NATO spent as much as Poland for their defense we would be spending 10 times more than Russia.”
He said the best security guarantees for Ukraine would be for the country to join NATO, although he acknowledged this would be “controversial.” Washington and key NATO members like Germany have balked at issuing Ukraine an invitation to join.
Tusk pushed back at the suggestion of sending European troops to Ukraine, an idea first touted by French President Emmanuel Macron but which is being mulled by other alliance members.
A bloody past
The two leaders also took the opportunity to signal they are moving past their mutual bloody past, making a breakthrough on agreeing to exhume bodies of people murdered during Second World War massacres.
In 1943, a guerrilla group called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (known by its Ukrainian acronym, UPA) slaughtered thousands of Poles to ethnically cleanse lands that had been part of Poland before the war but are now in western Ukraine. The exact numbers are in dispute, with Ukraine saying tens of thousands died, while Poland saying up to 100,000 were killed.
