Putin assessed during his Q&A session at the Valdai Club’s latest annual conference that recent European fearmongering about Russia “is driven by the serious deterioration in their economic and domestic political situation. Just look at what is happening to their economies, their social policy and the living standards of people in the major European countries. Under these circumstances, they desperately need to divert public attention away from domestic problems and towards external issues.”
He later elaborated that “Faced with adverse economic trends at home, an increasingly precarious position for their ruling political classes, and changing public sentiment, they now seem to be provoking confrontation with Russia and fueling further crises between Russia and Europe. They are doing so precisely in order to justify preparations for war and to rally as many supporters as possible around themselves, thereby enabling them to remain in power.” This is a reasonable assessment.
The latest hysteria kicked off in late April when liberal Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the Financial Times that Russia might test European NATO’s resolve in “months”. Reports then circulated after CIA chief John Ratcliffe’s unannounced trip to Moscow four months later in late August that he supposedly warned Russia against precisely this scenario. A month later by the end of September, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski declared that “Russia is at war with Europe”, thus worsening the hysteria.
Nevertheless, Finnish President Alexander Stubb tried talking some sense into his European NATO counterparts by downplaying the likelihood of a Russian attack, after which Sikorski walked back his rhetoric by suddenly claiming that “Russia doesn’t have the forces for a major attack on NATO.” Sikorski had by then also flip-flopped from fearmongering about threats to Russia to threatening Russia after he infamously boasted that European NATO “would defeat Russia rather quickly” if they went to war.
He also proposed large-scale NATO drills near Kaliningrad, which Poland has referred to by its historic Polish name Królewiec since mid-2023 back under conservative rule, which prompted Russia to make clear that nuclear war would follow any serous aggression against its exclave. Poland’s ruling liberals are therefore responsible for the hysterical doublethink that’s sweeping Europe about the fearful scenario a Russian attack on NATO and now the false confidence that’s driving talk of a NATO attack on Russia.
Putin’s assessment that economic and political factors are behind this hysteria is especially true in the Polish case since reputable polling suggests that the ruling liberal coalition risks being unseated by a conservative-nationalist one after fall 2027’s next Sejm elections if the current trends hold. Scaring Poles about Russia and then attempting to imbue them with the false confidence that they can “defeat Russia rather quickly” is an extremely manipulative form of electioneering that might ultimately backfire.
It’s intellectually insulting that Poland’s ruling liberals believe that they can pull Poles in these polar opposite directions for what might be the next 12 months in order to rally them behind their coalition. The “Russophrenia” of believing that Russia is about to steamroll through NATO while also believing that NATO can easily steamroll through Russia, to cite Irish journalist Brian McDonald’s famous concept, is difficult to maintain for that long and at scale without inadvertently turning more Poles against them.
