Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that the EU’s trade liberalization regime with Ukraine will end on 5 June due to his government’s efforts and confirmed that Poland won’t send troops to Ukraine despite what US Special Envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg recently claimed. This curiously coincided with Poland and Ukraine signing a cooperation agreement on regional policy where Poland will support Ukraine’s EU accession in exchange for Ukraine supporting Polish companies’ role in its reconstruction.
Right before these developments, the ruling liberal-globalist coalition’s presidential candidate narrowly won the first round, in which the three right-wing candidates collectively obtained a little over half of the vote. He’ll therefore have to win over some of the latter if he hopes to come out on top during the second round on 1 June. Should he win, then Tusk could flip-flop by requesting authorization from the president per Polish law to send troops to Ukraine, which his coalition ally would presumably approve.
These electoral dynamics and the potential geopolitical stakes involved contextualize Tusk’s mixed signals about the future of Polish policy towards Ukraine. After all, it’s contradictory for his government to convince the EU to reimpose restrictions on Ukrainian imports while also signing an agreement to help Ukraine join the EU and thus forever lift such restrictions if/once that happens, thus suggesting that he’s leading someone along. Whether that’s the electorate or Ukraine is the subject of debate.
On the one hand, his government’s toughened stance towards Ukraine since last summer might have been a long-term electioneering strategy, especially after surveys showed that Poles were getting fed up with Ukraine, so a soft stance towards it could have doomed the coalition’s presidential prospects. On the other hand, however, Poland has yet to receive anything tangible from Ukraine in exchange for all its support from 2022 onward, so a policy recalibration is long-overdue.
That recalibration has resulted in a policy that’s tougher than the previous conservative government’s as proven by Poland reviving the Volhynia Genocide dispute, only sending arms to Ukraine on credit from now on instead of for free like before, and now explicitly planning to profit from Ukraine as well. While it might have begun as an electioneering tactic, this recalibration has clearly taken on a life of its own since then, so there’s a chance that Tusk might actually be leading Ukraine along instead of the electorate.
At the same time, Tusk is a former President of the European Council and suspiciously close to Germany, so it can’t be ruled out that he could be ordered to flip-flop on Poland’s newly toughened policy towards Ukraine if his coalition ally wins the presidency. The only reason why he might be reluctant to do so is if he expects that pressure for early parliamentary elections might become unbearable, in which case his coalition could lose control of the legislature, thus foiling his liberal-globalist domestic agenda.
That possibly being the case, the best bet for on-the-fence Poles who are worried that Tusk might capitulate to European pressure to send troops to Ukraine if the liberal-globalist candidate wins is to vote for his opponent, who just pledged that he’d oppose those plans if he comes to power. Even in the unlikely event that Tusk is truly turning a new leaf on the foreign policy front, his track record over the decades might make many Poles distrust him and suspect that he’s leading them on instead of Ukraine.
