The two countries have had generally friendly ties since the fall of communism in 1989 and Lithuania regaining independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Warsaw’s ostentatious disappointment with Vilnius’ decision not to support the Russo-Polish initiative to lift the visa regime for the residents of Kaliningrad region has marked the beginning of a freeze in the bilateral relations.

 For months Lithuanian politicians and diplomats have been openly talking about their conviction that a new Polish leadership – composed of members of the liberal party, Civic Platform – would change its foreign policy after the presidential election. And they were right: after July Warsaw paid more attention to Berlin and Moscow than to Vilnius and the latter to Minsk, that is trying to make the Klaipeda oil terminal suitable for importing Venezuelan oil to Belarus.

 Even though the new Polish Chief of State Bronislaw Komorowski stems from an old noble Lithuanian family and does not hide his feelings for his historical homeland, he is not someone who is capable of implementing an independent policy, the way that President Lech Kaczynski did, wrote Audrius Baciulis on weekly Veidas.

 On Wednesday Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski criticised Lithuania in unusually blunt terms for European Union partners, saying its Baltic neighbour was failing to live up to its commitments either to ethnic Poles or to Polish investors. Some days before meetings among diplomats were postponed until local Poles were allowed to write their names in official documents using Polish letters.

President Bronislaw Komorowski has been in Paris and Berlin this week for talks with President Nicholas Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel. On his first trip abroad as President of Poland since being elected in July, Komorowski has said that reinvigorating the Weimar Triangle  – a diplomatic agreement signed by Poland, Germany and France in 1991 – is one of his key objectives.

 Regular meetings of leaders and ministers from these countries, which had been held from the 1990s, stalled during the presidency of Komorowski’s late predecessor Lech Kaczynski.

 Next year the EU‘s 27 countries will launch negotiations on the shape of the 2014-2021 budget. Many politicians are calling for austerity following the global economic crisis, which has emptied government coffers and increased national debts. “We expect the cohesion fund to be maintained,” Komorowski said, referring to the main EU aid fund. “It is so important to make solidarity real, to make development levels more equal,” he added in a news conference.

 Poland is to receive some 67 billion euros in regional aid from the bloc’s long-term budget for 2007-2013. Other former communist countries from central Europe also benefit substantially from EU funds.

 Some experts believe that the bloc’s budget will remain at least at the current level of around 1 percent of the Union’s economic output. The budget talks will also concern the future of the EU’s farm subsidies, which account for more than 40 percent of the expenditure. A special Parliament committee met in July.

 In Berlin President Komorowski visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial near the capital, together with German President Christian Wulff, to pay respects to a war hero. He then explained that this is “a way to demonstrate our shared view of our terrible past.”

At the end of July, Poland’s cabinet adopted a preliminary list of priorities for Poland’s EU presidency, which included the EU budget for 2014-2020. The negotiations of the EU budget for 2014- 2021 will be a crucial factor, determining the success of Poland’s presidency.

Article – August 19th, 2010.