Mark Brzezinski made the remark in an interview with the pan-Arab broadcaster Al Jazeera on Thursday, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
‘2.5 million refugees in 30 days’
The US envoy said: “Poland has a national policy to take all the refugees coming in from Ukraine and put them into people’s houses and apartments.”
He added: “Never before has a nation done that with refugees arriving at its border.”
Putting the situation in perspective, Brzezinski reflected: “When I was ambassador to Sweden, the Swedes were rightfully proud about how they had successfully assimilated 1 million refugees over 20 years.”
He told Al Jazeera that “Poland has received 2.5 million refugees in 30 days and put them all in people’s homes and apartments."
‘No threat of destabilisation’
Brzezinski said: “It wouldn’t have been impossible for the Poles who have built a successful, positive-growth economy, except for one year, the COVID year, over the last 30 years … to say to the arriving Ukrainian refugees: ‘We feel your pain, we see what you’re going through, and we can’t have you here because we’ve just rebuilt our country and we need to protect it.’”
However, Poland “did exactly the opposite,” he added.
“I’m here in Warsaw, Poland where there are 400,000 Ukrainian refugees … 10 percent of Poland’s population is recent arrivals from Ukraine and … the country is under no threat of becoming destabilised,” he told the Qatar-based broadcaster.
Brzezinski cautioned: “When you consider the economic motor-train for Central Europe that Poland is, if this country did become destabilised, it would collaterally affect about 14 countries in the region immediately.”
‘Important alignments between US and Poland’
He said that, despite the challenge posed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “what I have found actually is that this crisis has produced alignments on security and also on democracy and values and the economy that are important in terms of the American-Polish relationship.”
‘Poland is safe, Poland is secure’
Brzezinski reiterated his country's "commitment to Polish security": “We’ve been very clear with the Poles that we stand four-square with you on your security,” he said.
He added: “We have now 10,500 US troops in Poland, all on Polish bases, we have Patriot missiles staged to protect Poland and our president has been clear that we will protect every square inch of Polish territory because it’s a member of NATO.”
“Poland is safe, Poland is secure,” Brzezinski concluded, speaking in Polish.
Friday is day 51 of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Poland on Friday reported it had welcomed nearly 2.76 million refugees fleeing Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, aljazeera.com