Europe will have a tough time waging war in Ukraine without Ukraine’s next-door neighbor Poland. From Andrew Korybko at korybko.substack.com:
Poland’s direct participation in the conflict, even if only in a peacekeeping capacity, is integral to either perpetuating hostilities or rekindling them in the event that a ceasefire is agreed to.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk reaffirmed his position from late last year that his country won’t dispatch peacekeepers to Ukraine, which followed new Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declaring that the US won’t extend Article 5 guarantees to any NATO members that send troops there. Tusk’s Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz then drew attention to how Polish soldiers in Ukraine could escalate tensions with Russia, an obvious observation of course but one that Poland had hitherto never shared.
Poland’s newfound pragmatism is attributable to political calculations ahead of May’s presidential election. The ruling liberal-globalists want to replace the outgoing (and very imperfect) conservative president with one of their own in order to remove this obstacle to their plans for transforming Polish society. They’re therefore compelled to respond to worsening public opinion on Ukraine by precluding the dispatch of peacekeepers lest their candidate lose May’s election if they warmonger.
Poles’ views towards Ukraine have changed so much that Politico just published a detailed article about this here, where they cite the latest opinion polling from a reputable Polish research center showing that “only one in four Poles has a positive opinion of Ukrainians, while nearly a third hold a negative view.” In connection with that, a similarly reputable institution’s polling from last summer showed that only 14% support their troops deploying to Ukraine, which might be even less now after all that’s happened.
In brief, the revival of the Volhynia Genocide dispute combined with Ukrainian ingratitude to Poland after Kosiniak-Kamysz revealed that his country had maxed out its pro bono military aid to toxify mutual perceptions, with this being much more pronounced in Polish society than in the Ukrainian one. This shift resulted in Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski scrapping his earlier proposal for Poland to shoot down Russian missiles over Western Ukraine on the pretext of protecting its nuclear power plants.
