A year ago Piskorski was in Crimea coordinating the work of a team of international monitors overseeing the March 2014 referendum where the Crimeans overwhelmingly voted to rejoin the Russian Federation.
“For the mere fact that I went to Crimea and monitored the voting process there I was immediately vilified by the Polish media and politicians for allegedly causing damage to my country and the West as a whole… In just overnight I became an enemy of my country only because I saw with my own eyes everything that was happening in Crimea,” Piskorski said.
“The Crimeans simply used their right for self-determination which US President Woodrow Wilson formulated almost a century ago,” he added. “They did so in a situation where the Ukrainian state had stopped fulfilling its fundamental obligations to its citizens and started treating them as an enemy.”
Piskorski said the crisis in Ukraine led to unprecedented economic sanctions against Russia and its people, sanctions which are equally detrimental to the economic interests of both Russia and the European Union.
“In 2014 these sanctions cost the European farmers about seven billion euros in losses, and the closer a country was to Russia, the higher the losses incurred,” Piskorski noted.
Finland, too, found itself on the losing end, along with Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Greece, Italy and Spain.
In Poland the sharp drop in agricultural production caused by the sanctions led to mass protests by domestic producers.
“The original purpose of the sanctions, that is to bring pressure on Russia, was never achieved, but the Americans are still working hard to keep it up,” Mateusz Piskorski said.
