How Poland Sees the Ukraine War

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Warsaw, May 2023 © Andrew Stuttaford

Poland is, as it was in 1920, on the West’s front line, even if this time the conflict — cyberattacks apart — is across its border and it has NATO at its side. Back then, Western assistance consisted mainly of some French matériel, a large detachment of French officers, and a smaller collection of Brits. Led by Józef Piłsudski, the father of a reborn Poland, Polish forces launched a counter-attack against the Bolshevik army that was nearing Warsaw. The result, named after the river running through the city, was the “Miracle on the Vistula.” The invaders were routed, Poland was saved, and the Red Army was stopped from spreading Lenin’s revolution to a dangerously fissile Germany.

A statue of Piłsudski now stands by the square that again bears his name after a lengthy interruption during Nazi and Communist rule. At the far end is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Battles listed on stone tablets once again include those from the war against the Bolsheviks. History weighs heavily on Poland, and the malign role that Russia has played in Poland’s past goes a long way to explaining the robust Polish response to the invasion of Ukraine, and, indeed, its predictions that trouble was coming. In 2006, Radek Sikorski, Poland’s then–defense minister, was already hitting out at plans to build a gas pipeline connecting Germany and Russia under the Baltic Sea (thus bypassing Poland). He did so, tellingly, by comparing the scheme to the pact under which Hitler and Stalin had divided up Poland in 1939.

The meetings I attended on a visit to Warsaw in May, including one with the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, were off the record, but it reveals no secrets to relate the general agreement that to come to Ukraine’s aid was not only right but also in Poland’s interest. And most Poles seem to be of the same mind. Few I spoke to believed that Russia would stop at Ukraine. One analyst thought that Moldova, a former Soviet republic carved out of pre-war Romania, would be next (it borders Ukraine and is not in NATO), but after that, well . . .

Poland backed EU sanctions on Russia and has recently called for them to be expanded. It has also been a major supplier of arms to Ukraine, sending its first deliveries in the weeks before the invasion. Over the following twelve months, Poland provided Ukraine with an estimated $2.5 billion in financial assistance for military purposes (ranking it third after the U.S. and the U.K.) as well as large quantities of weaponry, including more than 300 tanks (mainly Soviet T-72s or their upgraded Polish equivalent, the PT-91, and — after an argument with Berlin — some German-made Leopard 2s), armored vehicles, long-range artillery, and self-propelled guns. A Polish arms manufacturer is making shells for Ukraine’s Soviet-era tanks. Poland was the first NATO country to send fighter jets (starting with a first installment of four MiG-29s in March), and although it has too few American F-16s of its own to hand over, it is now training Ukrainian pilots to fly them. Location counts, too. An airport in Poland’s southeast has been transformed into the principal logistics hub for the Western effort to support Ukraine.

In April, Poland’s finance minister, Magdalena Rzeczkowska, said that the country had spent over €10.5 billion on helping Ukraine (most of which was humanitarian aid for refugees). That’s a total exceeded only by Germany (which, for all its hesitation on military matters, is hosting about a million Ukrainian refugees) and the U.S. Calculating the number of Ukrainian refugees is not straightforward, but, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, 8.2 million have been recorded in Europe, including 1.6 million in Poland, which had a population of roughly 38 million in 2021.

I visited an adapted exposition center in Warsaw where about 650 refugees were staying. They were camped in cubicles in a vast hangar-like building but had access to other facilities such as classrooms and child-care spaces. Most of the refugees were women, quite a few of them with children. (Men of draft age — 60 or under — are not allowed to leave Ukraine.) Ukrainian refugees can work in Poland and are entitled to the same social benefits as Poles. Their children can attend Polish schools. Beyond offering immediate care and looking after their day-to-day needs, the center provides refugee services such as assistance in finding employment and housing. Most of those who turn up there don’t need to stay for long.

Relations between Poles and Ukrainians were difficult for much of the 20th century, reaching a hideous nadir in 1943–45 with savage inter-ethnic conflict in those parts of Western Ukraine that had been within Poland’s borders in the inter-war decades — a conflict in which Ukrainian nationalists had bloodier hands. Since the fall of Communism, however, Ukraine and Poland have, with the exception of a period a few years ago when the horrors of the 1940s triggered an acrimonious debate, grown close, helped by Ukraine’s recurring attempts to manage a more complete break from Moscow and by Poland’s appreciation of the improvement to its security that the establishment of a stable, Western-facing Ukraine would represent.

This rapprochement has been demonstrated at an individual level, too. Even before the war, 1–2 million Ukrainians were working in Poland. And then, in the months after the Russian invasion, Poles hosted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees in their homes. By most accounts, and in the opinion of most Poles with whom I talked, the refugees are integrating reasonably well. (It doesn’t hurt that it is fairly easy for a Ukrainian-speaker to learn Polish.) But there are some indications that Poles’ early openness to a massive influx of refugees is fading. In a country that usually takes a hard line on immigration, that could contribute to political turbulence as this fall’s general election draws closer.

On the other hand, despite some current shakiness, the resilient Polish economy — now the sixth-largest in the EU — is smoothing the path of the new arrivals, especially when it comes to getting a job. After emerging from Communism, Poland enjoyed 30 years of economic growth, a run interrupted only by Covid in 2020. GDP grew by just under 5 percent in 2022, although the World Bank expects this to slow to 0.7 percent this year before picking up again in 2024. Inflation, falling but still at 13 percent in May, is evidently a serious concern, but unemployment, at a little over 5 percent, is not. There are some questions about the state of public finances, but Poland can afford the hike in defense spending that is under way, from 2.4 percent of GDP in 2022 to 4 percent this year, a higher number in GDP terms than military spending in any other NATO country.

Poland’s motives for doing this are obvious. At the same time, the failure of most NATO members to meet the alliance’s 2 percent spending target has not passed unnoticed in Warsaw. Adding remembered insult to injury is the way that long-standing warnings from Poland and the Baltic states about Russian revanchism were ignored, for reasons that included condescension (they were seen merely as Eastern Europeans harboring old grudges), profit, and end-of-history naïveté. Unsurprisingly, I heard criticism of Germany’s ill-fated reliance on Russian gas — a mistake that it has repeated in its trade relations with China, thereby creating what one think-tanker described to me as a “morbid dependency.” (There is more realism about China in Warsaw than on Wall Street.)

The flip side of Polish awareness of the unreliability of some European NATO members — an unreliability that is political as well as financial — is an enthusiastic Atlanticism of a type rarely encountered west of the Oder. “There would be no Ukraine now without America,” I was told. As for the pursuit by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, of “strategic autonomy” for the EU, well, speaking in April, Morawiecki said he would prefer it to have a “strategic partnership” with the U.S. Given Poland’s increased military spending and growing economic strength, Warsaw’s views should carry more weight than in the past, and it may be a good sign that Macron in late May felt there was something to be gained by acknowledging that Western Europe should have paid more attention to those warnings from the east about the danger from Russia.

Those with whom I spoke could, naturally, only speculate as to how the war might end, but there was little doubt that Russia would remain a serious problem for the foreseeable future. The war in Ukraine should be seen not as a local dispute but as a stage in a wider struggle. Any “armistice”-style peace in Ukraine would, one analyst predicted, almost certainly be no more than a “pause.” With NATO or even EU membership for Ukraine a long way off, such thinking helps explain Warsaw’s interest in regional cooperation (an approach with echoes of Piłsudski’s unsuccessful initiatives to establish a bloc to act as a barrier against Germany and Soviet Russia in the inter-war years), whether economic, political, or military, that should so far as possible involve Ukraine and also help its reconstruction. A poor Ukraine will be a weak Ukraine. Meanwhile, amid fears that the Kremlin is intent on destabilizing Moldova, a well-publicized Polish delivery of a large batch of weapons, ammunition, and other equipment to the country’s interior ministry at the beginning of this month was a practical and symbolic demonstration of Poland’s emergence as a regional power.

The prospect of Poland’s becoming a Western bulwark in the east is welcome. But there’s a risk that it could be derailed by Poland’s domestic politics — although not, as some might think, because of the nature of its right-wing ruling party, the nationalist, socially conservative Law and Justice Party. According to many of its opponents, Law and Justice is, like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, steering Poland toward a more authoritarian form of government. Whether that’s fair is a topic for another time — this is also the view (with exceptions) that President Joe Biden, focused on Ukraine, appears to have taken, even if the EU has not. Suffice it to say, for now, that while there are good grounds for criticizing Law and Justice, Poland remains a lively democracy.

And it’s important to note that, when it comes to Ukraine, there is not too much that distinguishes Law and Justice from its principal competitor, Civic Platform, a more liberal party that gazes a little too longingly at Brussels.

If, however, the current state of the polls is an accurate reflection of how the electorate will vote in the fall, neither Law and Justice nor Civic Coalition (a grouping formed around Civic Platform) will have a majority. If so, the far-right Confederation Party, which has recently been scoring 10 percent in the polls, up from around 7 percent in the 2019 general election, could become a kingmaker. Law and Justice is polling at around 35 percent (down from 43 percent in 2019), which would give it around 200 of the 460 seats in the Sejm, the lower (and much more powerful) chamber in Poland’s bicameral legislature. Civic Coalition stands at 28 percent, which is more or less how it performed the last time.

Confederation’s rise probably owes more to discontent about Law and Justice not having done more for those in the provinces, the toll taken by inflation, and a spat over imported Ukrainian grain than it does to its views on foreign policy. But those views are what they are: They include rejection of the current level of support for Ukraine (and lurking barely beneath that, anti-Ukrainian sentiment), radical Euroskepticism, and anti-Atlanticism.

Poland is now on the threshold of securing a position in Europe that would have delighted Piłsudski. For Confederation to be handed the power to jeopardize that achievement would be another miracle on the Vistula — but for Russia this time, not Poland.