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Duda-Trump-Putin - What happens when your friend's friend is your enemy?

21.02.2024 13:30
Recent statements by Duda and Trump suggest that there is a conflict in the Polish president's allegiances, with his strong support for Ukraine and defence of Trump. 
Happier days? - Andrzej Duda and Donald Trump in 2020 - before Russias invasion of Ukraine.
Happier days? - Andrzej Duda and Donald Trump in 2020 - before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Photo: PAP/EPA/JIM LO SCALZO

This week the former American president has compared his "victimhood", his legal troubles, to that of Alexei Navalny who died on Friday.

Jędrzej Bielecki, writing in Poland's Rzeczpospolita, has commented that the moral equivalence in Trump's mind strongly suggests that a future President Trump would be willing to work closely with Putin. After all, Trump's comparison implies that "Vladimir Putin is not worse than Joe Biden." 

Trump's initial response to the news of Navalny's death last week did not blame Putin in any way, instead focussing on Trump's own legal woes. 

Trump has since "corrected" this first statement by adding that Navalny was indeed "brave" but that he "should not have returned to Russia". 

Poland's President Duda seems to have a large degree of trust in Trump, despite Duda's being thus far a firm ally of Ukraine. Duda was asked about Trump's claim that he would be able to solve the problem of the war in Ukraine "very quickly". He responded: "If President Donald Trump promised me something, his word was kept. He keeps his promises, treats his commitments seriously."

However, Trump's language has sometimes shifted from ambiguity about his loyalties to positively making overtures to Putin. 

What happens when your friend's friend is your enemy?

Sources: Rzeczpospolita, Reuters, tvn24

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