South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said he and his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda had agreed at a summit in Warsaw on Thursday (July 13) on a plan for Poland to buy additional South Korean weapons. The two presidents also agreed their countries could be optimal partners in the reconstruction of Ukraine.
At his meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda on Thursday in Warsaw, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol welcomed an expansion of bilateral ties in strategic areas including nuclear power, defence, and infrastructure.
"We agreed on Poland's plan to introduce additional South Korean weapons," Yoon said during a joint news conference, without giving further details
The two countries last year reached a $13.7 billion arms deal, Seoul's biggest ever, which included supplies of South Korean rocket launchers and fighter jets to Poland.
"In particular, we also agreed that South Korea and Poland could be optimal partners in the reconstruction of Ukraine," the South Korean president added.
The two leaders also condemned the North Korean regime "for continuing to disregard the human rights and rights to life of its own citizens while persistently developing nuclear missiles."
President Duda said Poland wants to produce South Korean arms domestically, while Yoon said the two leaders agreed to make defence cooperation develop in a mutually beneficial way.
"The cooperation between Poland and Korea has intensified a lot in the fields of the armaments industry. Today Korean armament products are making the Polish army more modern. We have recently received FA50 combat aircrafts. Today we already have Korean K2 tanks, we have K9 howitzers in the Polish army and there will be more products like these," the Polish leader said.
"We hope that we will not only buy new defence equipment in Korea for our soldiers, but that it will also be produced in Poland and, among other things, during this visit, we are seeking to have K2 tanks produced in our country," Duda said.
"We also cooperate in the field of infrastructure, we discussed the construction of the Central Communication Hub [in Poland]. We spoke about the investments in Polish ports and about developing the economic cooperation which will be based on Polish ports. We spoke about developing a railway network and all of this with the contribution from South Korean companies in our country."
Źródło: TVN24 News in English, Reuters