Activities of Secretary-General in Poland, 6-8 May

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon flew on Wednesday, 6 May, from New York to Gdansk, Poland, to attend the commemorations for the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

Upon arrival on 7 May, the Secretary-General held a bilateral meeting with Bronisław Komorowski, President of Poland, with whom he highlighted the shared sacrifice in the victory over fascism and the need for unity to prevent future conflicts.

The Secretary-General and President Komorowski then held a trilateral meeting with Petro Poroshenko, President of Ukraine.  The Secretary-General noted the urgent need for a lasting and durable ceasefire in Ukraine, and to advance the political elements of the Minsk agreements.

The Secretary-General later met with Ewa Kopacz, Prime Minister of Poland, with whom he exchanged views on United Nations-Polish cooperation, focusing particularly on issues of climate change and on the sustainable development goals.

He then joined a panel discussion with Heads of States and Governments at the European Centre of Solidarity on the lessons learned from the Second World War.  He said that the key principles of the United Nations Charter and all modern principles of international law were formulated as direct responses to the War, and that the anniversary was a powerful reminder of the vital need to protect and continually promote those principles.  (See Press Release SG/SM/16736.)

Following that discussion, the Secretary-General participated in a ceremony of lighting candles at the Fallen Shipyard Workers in Gdansk and in a wreath-laying ceremony at Westerplatte, where the first battle of the Second World War in Europe took place in 1939.

Overnight, he left Gdansk for Kyiv, Ukraine.