Sikorski dismissed suggestions that Poland should boycott G20 summit if Putin attends

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski has criticised the US decision to invite Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the G20 summit in Miami, calling it a "bad idea". However, Warsaw will not boycott the meeting.

Sikorski dismissed suggestions that Poland should boycott the summit if Putin attends. He said he would take part in the G20 Foreign Ministers' meeting in Atlanta in late October, whether or not Russia's foreign minister was invited.

"Diplomacy is more complex than it seems and sometimes puts us in uncomfortable situations, but we must be able to handle them," Sikorski said in an interview with the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita.

Sikorski said it was a bad idea to invite Putin, as the Russian leader is banned from entering several countries.

"Putin should not be viewed as a welcome guest as long as he is conducting an aggressive, colonial war against Ukraine," Sikorski added.

In the view of Poland's top diplomat, Trump's decision to invite Putin to the G20 summit indicates that the US president, "as a businessman, believes that in any situation there are solutions where both sides can win."

"This is an ahistorical approach to this war and so far it has yielded no results while, unfortunately, helping to pull Putin out of isolation," the minister added.

Asked whether Poland would thereby be "helping to bring Putin out of isolation by attending the G20," the foreign minister rejected the notion, emphasising that Poland is not the host of the summit.

Sikorski added that a similar dilemma was faced by Andrzej Domański, Minister of Finance and Economy, at the G20 ministerial meeting in Wisconsin. As he noted, they "handled it" there – the Russian minister was absent from the family photo.

The foreign minister was also asked whether Polish President Karol Nawrocki should participate in a "family photo" alongside Putin.

"It seems to me there is room for negotiation here with the American delegation, with the hosts. Especially since other participants – the prime minister of the United Kingdom, the president of France, the prime minister of India – perhaps to a lesser extent, will also not seek such a photograph," Sikorski replied.

The Kremlin has not yet confirmed Putin's participation in the G20 summit in Miami scheduled for December 2026.

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul stated that Putin's participation in the G20 meeting could mark the beginning of "serious negotiations" towards ending Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy previously said that the G20 summit in Miami could serve as a venue for a trilateral meeting between Ukraine, the US and Russia.