Poland is taking a "significant" responsibility in the humanitarian crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, U.S. President Joe Biden said during a visit to Warsaw on Saturday (March 26) adding other NATO countries should help lessen the burden. Biden also told his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda he viewed NATO's Article 5 guarantee of mutual defense between member-states as a "sacred" commitment.
"We do acknowledge that Poland is taking on a significant responsibility that I don't think should just be Poland's, it should be the whole of NATO's responsibility," U.S. President Joe Biden said on Saturday in Warsaw, at a meeting with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda.
"The fact that you have so many Ukrainians seeking refuge in the country of Poland. We understand that because we have on our southern border, thousands of people a day, literally not figuratively, trying to get into the United States. But we believe that we, the United States, should do our part relative to Ukraine as well, by opening our borders to another 100,000 people," he added.
Biden also reiterated the United States absolute commitment to defending NATO allies. "We take Article 5 as a sacred commitment, not a throwaway - a sacred commitment, that relates to every member of NATO," he underscored.
"One of the things that I thanked the president (Duda) for downstairs was the fact that the single most-important criterion in this time of changing worlds, so much is changing, not just here but in other parts of the world, is that NATO stay absolutely, completely, thoroughly united," the U.S. president said.
President Andrzej Duda thanked Biden for supporting Poland and deploying troops, saying Poles knew the meaning of "Russian imperialism" and attacks by its military.
"This Russian aggression, and this great tragedy for the Ukrainian people, which we are all experiencing with them - my compatriots, Poles have a great feeling of danger. Because we know what Russian imperialism and an attack by the Russian army means, because our grandparents and great-grandparents - sometimes our parents - survived it," Duda said.
More than 2 million people have fled the war to Poland, out of the roughly 3.8 million who have left Ukraine all together.
Poland was until the collapse of communist rule in 1989 behind the Iron Curtain for four decades, under Soviet influence and a member of the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact security alliance.
It is now the biggest formerly-communist member of the European Union and NATO.
Źródło: TVN24 News in English, Reuters