Radosław Tomasz "Radek" Sikorski (born 23 February 1963) is a Polish politician, journalist and statesman who is the longest-serving Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs since 2023, previously holding the office between 2007 and 2014, since 2025 also serving as Deputy Prime Minister. He was a Member of the European Parliament between 2019 and 2023. Earlier he was Marshal of the Sejm from 2014 to 2015. He previously served as Deputy Minister of National Defence in 1992 in Jan Olszewski's cabinet, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1998 and 2001 in Jerzy Buzek's cabinet and Minister of National Defence between 2005 and 2007 in the cabinets of Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz and Jarosław Kaczyński.
Graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford, Sikorski worked as a journalist for The Observer and The Spectator between 1986 and 1989. He was a war correspondent in Afghanistan in 1986, then in Angola in 1989. Being a Bilderberg Group regular, he is on its key Steering Committee; Sikorski was also part of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute between 2003 and 2005. In 2012, he was included on the list of Top 100 Global Thinkers 2012 published by the Foreign Policy magazine. In 2015, Sikorski became a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Studies of Harvard University. In 2025 he became an Honorary Fellow at the Pembroke College, his alma mater. He is a Senior Network Member at the European Leadership Network (ELN). He is a member of the Civic Coalition (formerly Civic Platform), in which he is seen as being part of the party's right wing.
Born in Bydgoszcz, Sikorski served as chairman of the local student strike committee in March 1981 while studying at the I Liceum Ogólnokształcące (High School). He travelled to the United Kingdom to study English in June 1981. After martial law was declared in December 1981, he was granted political asylum in Britain in 1982. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Pembroke College, University of Oxford.
During his time at Oxford, Sikorski was head of the Standing Committee of the debating society, the Oxford Union (where he organised debates on martial law), president of the Oxford University Polish Society, member of the Canning Club, and was elected to the Bullingdon Club, a dining society that counted among its members future British Prime Minister, David Cameron, future Chancellor George Osborne, and future Prime Minister Boris Johnson. His articles were published in prestigious Polish émigré magazines as well as Britain's Sunday Telegraph and Tatler magazines. He graduated in 1986. In 1987, Sikorski acquired British citizenship, which he renounced in 2006 upon being named Minister of Defence of Poland.
In the mid-1980s, Sikorski worked as a freelance journalist for publications such as The Spectator and The Observer. He also wrote for the Indian newspaper The Statesman of Kolkata. In 1986, he travelled in Afghanistan, as he stated in his book, "to write about the war the mujahideen were waging against the Soviet Union". While a war correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph, he brought out the first report and photographs of the US Stinger missiles, whose use was a turning point in the war.
In 1987, Sikorski made a hundred-day journey under Soviet bombardment to the ancient city of Herat, Afghanistan. He won the 1st prize singles in the category Spot News of World Press Photo Awards in 1988 for a photograph of a family killed and mummified in their home as a result of a Soviet Air Force bombing raid.
His adventures were presented in the documentary "Polish Mujahideen: Radosław Sikorski", produced by Discovery Channel. Sikorski described his perilous journey to Herat in his first book Dust of the Saints: A Journey to Herat in Time of War.
In 1989, he became the chief foreign correspondent for the U.S. conservative magazine National Review, reporting from Afghanistan and Angola. He received praise for his article published in January 1989, "The coming crack-up of Communism", which proved prophetic. His article describing an ambush on the Benguela Highway conducted by Jonas Savimbi's UNITA rebels attracted widespread interest.
In 1990–91, he was the Warsaw correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph. He was the author of the Interview of the Month program on the public Polish TV, in which he interviewed Margaret Thatcher, Lech Wałęsa, Václav Klaus, Otto von Habsburg, Henry Kissinger, Qian Qichen and others.
Deputy Minister in Olszewski and Buzek governments (1992–2001)
Sikorski returned to Poland in August 1989. He briefly served as deputy defence minister in the Jan Olszewski government in 1992, in which he helped launch the Polish bid to join NATO. From 1998 to 2001, Sikorski served as undersecretary of state at the ministry of foreign affairs in the Jerzy Buzek's government, being deputy first to Bronisław Geremek, and then to Władysław Bartoszewski. He oversaw the consular service and initiated reforms of services for Poles abroad. He signed agreements to abolish visas with countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Singapore and Israel among them. He was Honorary Chairman of the Foundation for Assistance to Poles in the East.
During his time as a Deputy Foreign Minister, Sikorski focused on reforms inside the Ministry and started the campaign to protest the use of the misleading term "Polish concentration camps" in western media. He introduced the "cheap visa" program for Poland's Eastern neighbors and started the recovery of post-Soviet properties in Warsaw. He introduced competitions for posts of heads of Polish Institutes abroad. When Ted Turner made a demeaning joke about Poles in a Washington speech, Sikorski demanded an apology and Turner complied. Sikorski's appeal to Polish nationals with dual citizenship to use the passport of the country they were visiting caused some controversy among the Polish expatriate community, but has now become an established practice.
Policy analyst in the US (2002–2005)
From 2002 to 2005, Sikorski was a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative. He was editor of the analytical publication European Outlook, having organised international conferences, including the "Ronald Reagan – Legacy for Europe" in 2003, during which prominent politicians from Eastern Europe discussed the impact the U.S. president left on the world. Other major conferences included 25th Anniversary of the birth of Solidarity, "Axis of Evil: Belarus – The Missing Link" and "Ukraine's Choice" at the time of the Orange Revolution.
Minister of National Defence (2005–2007)
In 2005, Sikorski returned to Poland and was elected senator from his home town of Bydgoszcz with 76,370 votes. He joined Prime Minister Marcinkiewicz's government as Minister of National Defence on 31 October. During his time in MoD, he moved Warsaw Pact-era files to the Institute of National Remembrance, declassified Warsaw Pact maps which demonstrated Soviet plans to use nuclear weapons in an offensive war against NATO and cancelled the military pension of Helena Wolińska-Brus, a Stalin-era prosecutor who sentenced the anti-communist Polish resistance general August Emil "Nil" Fieldorf to death. He introduced electronic auctions in procurement for defence equipment, saving the ministry a great amount of money. He announced the tender to buy a fleet of new jets for government transportation. He declassified a file of an operation codenamed "Szpak" (starling) by the Military Information Services (Wojskowe Służby Informacyjne, WSI) which documented their operations against him containing transcripts of the bugging of his home and telephone as well as hostile articles in the media inspired by WSI operatives.
Sikorski resigned on 5 February 2007, on the eve of Poland's engagement in the war in Afghanistan in protest against the activities of the chief of military intelligence, Antoni Macierewicz. Though never a member of the Law and Justice party, he served out the parliamentary term in the Law and Justice Senatorial Club. In the early parliamentary elections of 2007, he was elected to the Lower House (Sejm) with 117,291 votes, one of 10 best results in the country.