Liberal Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced earlier this week that his country will host drills later this fall with the Anglo–French-led “Coalition of the Willing” in preparation of the “security guarantees” that the West plans to provide Ukraine upon the cessation of hostilities. The E3 comprised of those two and Germany confirmed in early June that they plan to deploy troops there in connection with this. Tusk also declared his country’s willingness to permanently host more allied forces.
Some have accordingly speculated that the upcoming drills could precede Poland’s possible participation in a post-conflict “peacekeeping” mission in Ukraine, but that won’t happen for five reasons. The first is that Poland and Ukraine are in the midst of a spiraling dispute sparked by Zelensky’s state-level glorification of the Volhynia Genocide’s OUN-UPA culprits. Given their political tensions, Poland won’t do anything more than it already is to help Ukraine, thus making a troop deployment there very unlikely.
The second point is that Tusk’s ruling liberal coalition was forced by public pressure connected with this spiraling dispute into hardening their approach to Ukraine ahead of fall 2027’s next Sejm elections. Seeing as how Ukraine is unprecedentedly unpopular in Polish society nowadays, any suggestion by Tusk or his fellow coalition members of deploying Polish troops there would be political suicide. He and his team therefore know better than to do this, but even in the scenario that they wanted to, it would fail.
That’s because the third point concerns rival conservative President Karol Nawrocki’s written pledge before the second round of elections in spring 2025 that he wouldn’t authorize the deployment of Polish troops to Ukraine if he became the next Commander-in-Chief. He’s since taken a very hard line against Ukraine, which is popular among Poles as proven by reliable polling, so it’s unrealistic to imagine that he’d unexpectedly flip-flop and especially at the expense of his allied conservatives’ electoral ratings.
The fourth point is that any Polish troop deployment to Ukraine would entail significant costs, particularly in the financial realm and as regards the credible risk of a direct conflict with Russia after the Kremlin vowed to strike foreign forces there, and neither society nor the state want to shoulder them. “Poland’s Military-Industrial Complex Is Embarrassingly Underdeveloped” and “Its Military Build-Up Might Have Ultimately Been For Nothing” so it’s not in a position to risk a hot war with Russia anyhow.
And finally, nationalist Ukrainians could resume their ancestors’ terrorist campaign against Poles if Polish troops return to their localities even in the fantasy that Nawrocki authorizes this after Kiev’s voluntary denazification, while desperate internally displaced people could be recruited by Russia to this end too. Neither the Polish public nor the state have the appetite for waging an indefinite anti-insurgency campaign, let alone one that could spill over the border into a separatist conflict, ergo why it’s unlikely.
Having explained the five reasons why Poland won’t deploy troops to Ukraine, it should be said that Poland isn’t opposed to its allies doing so, and it would likely help them logistically. This contextualizes Tusk’s invitation for more of them to permanently deploy to Poland. Regardless of whatever those foreign forces might then do, the likelihood of Poland deploying troops to Ukraine is infinitesimally low, so analysts shouldn’t include this variable in their scenario forecasts about what might then follow.
