Poland became Ukraine’s junior partner over course of the NATO-Russian proxy war instead of the inverse due to its politicians declining to leverage their country’s position as its neighbor’s lifeline for coercing economic and political concessions in exchange for aid. This naïve approach began to change in summer 2023 after the former (very imperfect) conservative-nationalist government complained about how the influx of cheap Ukrainian grain on the domestic market harmed Polish farmers.
The liberal-globalist coalition that then replaced them surprisingly continued this policy and even built upon it by then demanding that Ukraine exhume and properly bury the Volhynia Genocide victims’ remains as well as declaring that more military aid will only be given on credit and no longer for free. This last-mentioned policy followed Poland being excluded from the Ukrainian endgame after it wasn’t invited to mid-October’s Berlin Summit between the American, British, French, and German leaders.
Returning Prime Minister Tusk is a Europhile with very pro-German tendencies, but he’s also an astute politician who knows that his party might not replace outgoing conservative-nationalist President Duda during next year’s election if it doesn’t at least make a show of putting Polish national interests first. This observation wasn’t lost on German-owned Politico, which published an unexpectedly critical piece on Monday about how “Poland’s split-personality disorder to blight trade talks with Ukraine”.
The gist is that Eurocrats should temper their expectations for a breakthrough in trade and other relations with Ukraine during Poland’s rotating Council of the EU presidency, which’ll last half a year from January to June 2025, due to the aforementioned domestic political reasons. They candidly explain how this is attributable to his balancing act that aims to keep the conservative-nationalist opposition at bay, but it’s still portrayed negatively in terms of the bigger picture.
One of the reasons for that is because the German-led EU doesn’t want Ukraine to make any economic or political concessions to Poland since that would reverse the state of strategic affairs whereby the former has become the latter’s senior partner over nearly the past three years. The problem from their perspective is that Tusk might feel coerced by domestic political circumstances into keeping up the tough guy act ahead of next year’s presidential election, which could further worsen Polish-Ukrainian ties.
In that event, seeing as how Poland is the geographic gateway to Ukraine, Warsaw might more assertively leverage its position as Kiev’s lifeline to either get what it wants or punish its neighbor. This could also impede third parties’ ties with Ukraine, in particular Germany’s post-conflict military aid and economic reconstruction plans, which could gradually rebalance Polish-Ukrainian relations. That outcome would be at the expense of what Germany envisages to be its hegemonic role over both.
There’s also the possibility that Tusk’s efforts are ultimately for naught and the conservative-nationalist opposition’s candidate for president beats the ruling liberal-globalist coalition’s, which could make it much more difficult for him to walk back his government’s newly hardline policy even if he wants to. Moreover, it could also create a fait accompli whereby this same approach continues for reasons of inertia, which could then characterize his government’s stance till the 2027 parliamentary elections.
After all, even if his party doesn’t win the presidency, it might not want to risk losing its coalition’s control over parliament by that time if he drops the tough guy act after the next election till then seeing as how fed up Poles are becoming with Ukraine. From the viewpoint of Germany’s hegemonic interests over Poland and its aspiring such ones over Ukraine, it’s better for Tusk to throw the presidential election by backing Kiev to the hilt over the next half-year than trying to help his own party win instead.
Tusk will likely remain a Europhile with pro-German tendencies at heart, but he might feel pressured to keep aping conservative-nationalist policies towards Ukraine up to the point of actually implementing them if he hopes to keep his political career as explained, which could lead to a startling transformation. In fact, this liberal-globalist has already overseen more conservative-nationalist policies in this regard than his predecessors from that ideologically opposite camp, which no one foresaw a year ago.
It’s therefore possible that he continues being pushed in that direction for self-serving domestic political reasons, albeit imperfectly because there will probably remain some issues like abortion that he still feels strongly enough about to not change his policy, also calculating that it’ll help him win elections. On Ukraine, however, he’s already transformed into more of a conservative-nationalist than the opposition, and this opportunism is starting to scare the Eurocrats as evidenced by Politico’s latest piece about him.
