President Trump hosted Poland’s right-wing and largely ceremonial president, Karol Nawrocki, in Washington on Wednesday for a meeting and lunch, a visit that highlighted divisions within the biggest economic and military power on the European Union’s eastern fringe.
Mr. Trump, who welcomed Mr. Nawrocki in the Oval Office and endorsed him before his election in June, has shunned Poland’s center-left government, which controls the country’s foreign and defense policy. In his so far fruitless pursuit of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, Mr. Trump has largely ignored Poland and other countries that border Ukraine and see Russia as a dangerous aggressor.
During the meeting, Mr. Trump acknowledged that his two-week deadline for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to agree to a meeting for peace negotiations with Ukraine was quickly approaching. Mr. Trump said he hoped to speak with the Russian leader soon.
In a wide-ranging appearance in the Oval Office that also touched on China’s extravagant military parade and the possibility of sending the U.S. National Guard to New Orleans, Mr. Trump said that he was open to stationing more American troops in Poland but neglected to give any details.
“We’ll put more there, if they want,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Nawrocki on Wednesday at the White House has helped calm anxiety in Poland that its voice is not being heard. But it has also laid bare differences between Poland’s government, headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a critic of Mr. Trump in the past, and right-wing political forces aligned with Mr. Nawrocki.
According to Polish media reports, Mr. Nawrocki rejected a request from the government that it be represented in his delegation traveling to the United States. Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, is also visiting Washington but not the White House.
That prompted public sniping this week between the Polish government and Mr. Nawrocki’s backers.
“There cannot be two foreign policies serving one country,” Pawel Wronski, the Polish foreign ministry spokesman, told a news conference on Tuesday in Warsaw. He said the ministry wished Mr. Nawrocki well in his meeting with Mr. Trump but urged him to stick to government policy.
In video message released this week, Mr. Sikorski reminded Mr. Nawrocki that the government, not the presidency, sets foreign policy, and said that the cabinet “has adopted a position so that the president knows what to focus on during the talks” with Mr. Trump.
“We are most interested in the president discussing Putin’s true goals in Ukraine and seeking a just peace for Ukraine,” he said. And Mr. Sikorski urged Mr. Nawrocki to prevent any “reduction of American troops in Europe, particularly in Poland.”
Mr. Nawrocki’s office balked at taking orders from the government. “If someone thinks they can issue instructions that bind the president, they don’t know the Constitution,” Zbigniew Bogucki, head of the Chancellery of the President, told Polish radio.
Mr. Nawrocki, a former nationalist historian, shares the government’s deep distrust of Russia, an unwavering feature of Polish foreign policy, and he has voiced support for Ukraine in its war. But he has also given voice to a view common on the Polish right that Ukrainian nationalism is a menace and that Ukrainians who fled to Poland after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 have overstayed their welcome.
Last month, he vetoed legislation extending benefits for Ukrainian refugees and has proposed making it illegal to propagate the views of Ukraine’s 1930s nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. During the Polish election campaign, he said there should be no discussion of admitting Ukraine to either NATO or the European Union until Ukraine addresses the “extremely brutal crimes against 120,000 of its neighbors,” a reference to the 1943 Volhynia massacres.
Many Poles consider Bandera a bloodthirsty killer. But the government has tried to calm longstanding public grievances against Ukrainian nationalists so as to avoid giving fuel to Mr. Putin’s narrative that Ukraine’s government is inherently fascist.
Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia.
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