Kaczyński pays PLN 50,000 to the Ukrainian army as a settlement with former foreign minister

On Tuesday, Jarosław Kaczyński, Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) ruling party president remitted PLN 50,000 (around $11,500) to the National Bank of Ukraine for the benefit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, thus ending a court dispute with Radosław Sikorski, the former foreign minister of Poland, RMF24 reported.

“I am doing this with satisfaction,” stressed Kaczyński in a statement submitted to PAP, a Polish state-run press agency.

“I’m glad we found a patriotic solution,” Sikorski wrote, accepting Kaczyński’s apology.

In 2016, in an interview, Jarosław Kaczyński, speaking of the Smolensk catastrophe, stated that Radosław Sikorski, the then foreign minister, had committed diplomatic betrayal.

Sikorski sued Kaczyński, demanding an apology. In 2018, the District Court in Warsaw ruled that the PiS president does not have to apologize. In 2020, the Court of Appeal in Warsaw found that Kaczyński had violated Sikorski’s personal rights and obliged the PiS leader to publish an apology. Finally, in 2022, the court awarded Sikorski over PLN 708,000 (around $163,000) from Kaczyński to cover the costs of publishing the apology on Onet, Poland’s largest web portal.

In an interview with Gazeta Polska, Kaczyński said that he did not have such an amount of money. In response, Sikorski tweeted, “I believe that penalties for defamation should be severe, but not devastating. If Kaczynski pays 50,000 zlotys to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, I will refrain from demanding an apology for calling me a diplomatic traitor.”

Kaczyński decided to accept the offer. “Ukraine fights for its independence and freedom, but also for our security. We support it and we will support it. Since the payment to the support fund for the Armed Forces of Ukraine closes my controversial dispute with Radosław Sikorski, I do so with satisfaction,” the leader of the ruling party stressed in the statement.