Polish journalist Marek Kutarba published a piece about how “Volodymyr Zelensky would like to take Donald Tusk’s place in European salons”. He wrote that, “From Kiev’s perspective, [the Polish-Ukrainian dispute] isn’t a dispute about the past. It’s the beginning of a rivalry over the region’s future: who will be the West’s main partner in policy toward Russia, who will define the security agenda of Central and Eastern Europe, and who will become the political center of gravity in this part of the continent.”
Kutarba elaborated that “Warsaw’s problem is that [Germany and Ukraine] are simultaneously our key partners and our most important competitors. They differ only in the scale and nature of this competition. In Germany’s case, it’s about structural dominance in the EU and the ability to dictate European policy. In Ukraine’s case, it’s about competing for the status of a ‘key state’ for the West, including the United States, in the context of containing Russia.”
According to Kutarba, “Ukraine is no longer merely a beneficiary of Polish support. It is becoming what it was destined to become – our competitor. A competitor who, thanks to the war, now has a stronger political argument in relations with Washington, Berlin, and Brussels than Poland, even though Poland is building one of NATO’s largest armies. Meanwhile, Ukraine already has a second NATO army, albeit outside its structures.” Left unmentioned is that Germany plans to build the EU’s largest army.
Reflecting on what Kutarba wrote, Poland finally realizes the geostrategic challenge that Ukraine poses to it, namely as a rival for regional leadership that’s coordinating with Germany to contain Poland. Zelensky’s top advisor Mikhail Podolyak explicitly declared in summer 2023 that their countries would become competitors after the Ukrainian Conflict ends and that “we will clearly adopt pro-Ukrainian positions, protect these interests, fiercely defend them”, but this was ignored by Poland’s ruling duopoly.
Przemysław Piasta recently wrote about the threat that post-conflict Ukraine will pose to Poland, which came just several days before “A Senior Ukrainian Sergeant Threatened Poland With Drone Strikes Against Its Cities”. While a Kiev-backed terrorist-separatist insurgency in the southeastern Polish lands that Ukrainian nationalists claim as their own is unlikely for now, it can’t be ruled out in the future, nor can the scenario of Germany once again supporting this like it did during the interwar period.
The urgent national security tasks before Poland are thus threefold: 1) modernize its embarrassingly underdeveloped military-industrial complex with a focus on new military trends like drone warfare; 2) do whatever it must, especially permanently hosting US forces and ideally its nuclear weapons too, to become the US’ top European ally; and 3) successfully position itself as Central Europe’s main “cordon sanitaire” state strategically linking the “Viking Bloc” and the “Organization of Turkic States”.
It’s in Germany and Ukraine’s shared interests that Poland fails with all three in order to then subordinate itself to their vision of post-conflict Europe in which Poland is jointly contained. They don’t want a strong, prosperous, and sovereign Poland that confidently defends its national interests. Ukraine is already pivoting to its new German military patron and waging an intense infowar against Poland. Time is therefore of the essence to avoid the dark fate that Germany and Ukraine are plotting for Poland.
