Indeed, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer himself, invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, to commemorate that tragedy together.

Nobody knows, and neither Tusk nor Kaczynski was saying. They suggested only some vague notions of state intervention on behalf of the poor and needy.

But Kaczynski, a member of Solidarity in the 1980 s who was eager to overthrow the communist regime, was more mistrustful of the Russians than Tusk.

But they can often frame the choices and broker coalitions to push the existing boundaries of European integration. None of the EU s top three new faces (Juncker, Tusk, and Mogherini) has a track record in this sense.

But a restructured Commission is not enough to ensure a reset of Europe s foreign policy strategy. For that to happen, Mogherini must assert herself as a leader, backed by Juncker and the new European Council president, Donald Tusk.

Moreover, as parties govern longer, their strongest personalities tend to be replaced by weaker ones. Civic Platform contested this election after replacing Tusk with Ewa Kopacz, and has had the same problem with a number of other substitutions.

Liberals are viewed as vampires, seeking only to make money for themselves and their cronies. So it is understandable that both leading presidential candidates, Donald Tusk and Lech Kaczynski, ran as fast as they could from liberal ideas.

What I've been doing from 14 to 17 was, I was assisting them collecting ivory tusk, meat and whatever they were killing, poaching, hunting in the forest, bring it in the main city to get access to the market.

But, though Tusk now has an important sounding position, the European Council President decides nothing. The president mainly presides over the meetings of the EU s national leaders, and an incumbent s influence depends on his or her ability to set the agenda and facilitate compromises.

Donald Tusk, the former Polish prime minister who was chairing his first summit as President of the European Council, supports additional financing for Ukraine. But, as the Financial Times reports, several EU countries willingness to come up with the money remains lukewarm at best.

If not halted, such measures could call into question the Jewish presence on the Continent in the longer term. Yet Tusk has ruled out a reversal of the ban, and one of his ministers asked the Jewish and Muslim communities to challenge it before the Constitutional Court.

Given Russian behavior in Ukraine, however, EU leaders have been rethinking their approach. In this context, the Commission s new structure not to mention the fact that the new European Council president, former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, has long sought an energy union may well push the policy forward.

And then, when the government reduced the size of the absurdly expensive, but popular, funded pension system (2011 2014), Tusk attempted to compensate voters by pumping all additional free resources into family benefits. Although this was justified, given Poland s very low birth rate, it was also intended to appeal to his urban electorate.

A few days ago, the ghosts of the past returned to the Sejm, when deputies rejected a government bill intended to keep religious slaughter legal. Even many of the bill s supporters (including Prime Minister Donald Tusk) were concerned not with defending the rights of religious minorities, but rather with protecting meatpacking jobs.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski have particularly taken the initiative on the EU s strategy towards Russia, where Poland has largely overcome its differences with Germany and is now at the forefront of efforts to develop a genuinely comprehensive approach. Poland has also led on European defense (though it declined to take part in the military intervention in Libya).

For starters, European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker, European Council President Donald Tusk, and the European Parliament should work to ensure that the public debate about refugees and migrants is anchored in fact. As it stands, misconceptions are rampant, with residents of many EU countries believing, for example, that they host three times as many foreigners as they actually do.

That is the sad lesson of Poland s parliamentary election two weeks ago, and of Sunday s indecisive presidential election (which will be decided by a run off between Donald Tusk and Lech Kaczynski on October 23rd.) To be sure, the communists cum postcommunists who have dominated Polish politics since 1989 were utterly repudiated the left got scarcely 11 of the vote in the parliamentary poll.

The experience of the previous incumbent, former Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy, in dealing with his own country s fractious coalitions proved very useful when he had to persuade national leaders to make decisions during the euro crisis. Tusk will have to achieve something similar in the face of the new challenges confronting Europe today, which include Russian aggression in Ukraine, the rise of terrorism in the Middle East, and a stagnant economy at home.

If Cameron sets out such a reform agenda at the European Council in June and is prepared to listen as well as to talk, he could set in motion a process that benefits all of Europe. Then, it will be primarily up to EU Council President Donald Tusk, under the Luxembourg, Netherlands, Slovakia, and Malta presidencies of the EU over the next two years, to move a reform package forward by early 2017.