Ukraine should not allow itself to treat its neighbors in a way that it would not allow them to treat itself, said the second president of Ukraine (1994-2005) Leonid Kuchma, answering a question about a recipe for improving relations with its western neighbors: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.

"There is only one recipe - mutual respect. Don't allow yourself to treat your neighbors the way you wouldn't allow them to treat you," Kuchma said in an exclusive interview with the Interfax-Ukraine agency.

He noted that Ukraine has “different relations with different histories” with all four countries, and that with some of them the problems are long-standing, while with others they have recently arisen and could have been avoided if each step had been calculated.

"Move forward together, don't attack each other - that's the whole recipe. Something tells me that if ten years ago we had chosen a more flexible model for resolving our Hungarian issue, Orban [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban] would have had a much harder time justifying his anti-Ukrainian line to the EU and NATO leadership during all this time," Kuchma said.

He also noted that the standard of interstate relations for him during his presidency was relations with Poland and President Aleksander Kwasniewski.

"When he and I came to power in the mid-90s of the last century, our countries did not treat each other very well ... But Kwasniewski and I, having become friends very quickly, began to do everything so that Ukraine and Poland would become true friends too. ‘We forgive and ask for forgiveness’ - this was our principle, bequeathed by Pope John Paul II, who helped us in the matter of reconciling our peoples as best as he could. And I think that the unprecedented level of support for Ukraine, which Poland has demonstrated since the first hours of the Russian invasion, is to some extent due to what Kwasniewski and I did," noted the second president of Ukraine.

Kuchma pointed out that "turning the graves of past conflicts into a means of manipulation is generally unacceptable, but it is even more unacceptable in times when the graves of victims of the current war of Ukrainians with an inhuman enemy, who is trying to destroy our nation today and does not hide his intention to do the same to the Poles tomorrow, are multiplying every day."