Mateusz Morawiecki

Belarus forced a passenger plane carrying a wanted opposition activist to divert and land in its capital, provoking a furious outcry from world leaders who described it as an "act of state terrorism" ahead of an EU summit on May 24 expected to toughen sanctions on Minsk.

On Thursday, Romania's Prime Minister Florin Citu had a telephone conversation with his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki, during which current items on the Romanian-Polish agenda - cooperation in trade and investment - were addressed along with the energy dimension that together with the continuation of close defence and security collaboration are priority items on the bilateral agenda.

He has certainly made the headlines recently. In late March he gave an interview to the far-right weekly Sieci, in which he openly accused the prime minister, his nominal boss, of implementing policies more in tune with the opposition. Mateusz Morawiecki, he said, "is a skilled politician who knows how to convince the PiS leadership to run a policy contradictory to the 2014 agenda".

Ziobro argued that the measures to allow the EU to generate "own resources" for the plan (ie. issue debt) would lead to a further - unacceptable, in his view - erosion of national sovereignty. Also, as the architect of the PiS's controversial justice reforms, he did not like the rule-of-law conditionality that the European Commission has attached to the disbursement of funds from the RRF.

 Over 20 Polish medics will fly to Brussels on Thursday to vaccinate 3,500 employees of the NATO Headquarters using the newly resumed AstraZeneca vaccine. Poland received an official invitation from NATO to carry COVID-19 vaccinations at the military bloc's headquarters in Brussels, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced on Sunday.

The onslaught began immediately after the 2010 general election, when Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his right-wing Fidesz party returned to power. The government immediately adopted a raft of laws imposing new restrictions on media outlets, and established the loyalist-staffed Media Council to enforce them.

"The governing body of Fidesz has decided to leave the EPP Group immediately," Prime Minister Viktor Orban wrote in a letter to Manfred Weber, chairman of the EPP Group in the European Parliament. "The amendments to the rules of the EPP Group are clearly a hostile move against Fidesz and our voters."

The Polish government announced Friday that it will ease additional COVID-19 induced lockdown restrictions, starting February 12.

High-level Polish officials have jumped on the bandwagon of criticism over US President Donald Trump's social media bans to promote a recent draft law officially aimed at combatting online "censorship", but which digital rights groups warn must be scrutinised carefully.

A few weeks later, after a successful European Council summit, which agreed a compromise solution over the rule-of-law conditionality that EU institutions want to impose on EU funds, Morawiecki was hailing it as a victory for Poland: "Thank you [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orban for our cooperation for the best budget for Poland and the fight to keep the agreed conditions."