Radosław Sikorski

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Radosław "Radek" Sikorski (born February 23, 1963 in Bydgoszcz), is a conservative British-Polish politician, journalist and, as of 2006, the Minister of National Defence.

Sikorski was much involved in the Solidarity unrest in the late 1970s, and chaired the student strike committee in Bydgoszcz in March 1981. Stranded in Britain when martial law was declared in his homeland in December 1981, he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. He then worked as a freelance journalist. In 1984, he took British citizenship. In the mid-1980s, Sikorski worked as a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Angola. For a photograph taken in Afghanistan he won the World Press Photo prize in 1988. From 1990 he was an advisor to Rupert Murdoch on investments in Poland.

Returning to Poland, in 1992 he briefly became deputy defence minister in the Jan Olszewski government. From 1998 to 2001 he served as deputy minister of foreign affairs in the Jerzy Buzek government. From 2002 to 2005 he was a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative. He returned to government in Poland as defence minister in 2005. He is very loyal to nationalist-populist PiS government which is not favourable for development of Polish Armed Forces.

He is married to the American journalist and historian Anne Applebaum; they have two children, Alexander and Tadeusz.