Poland’s Pivotal Role

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, August 21, 2023

 

Krakow, Poland — Russia and the U.S. NATO ally Poland are not at war. But they’re not really at peace, either.

 

The roads and railways running through Poland are the transportation routes for more than 80 percent of the military hardware delivered to Ukraine. Last year, Poland agreed to open up five additional access points for trucks on the border with Ukraine, doubling the cargo-traffic capacity between the two countries. The Russian government was always likely to eventually deem those routes worthwhile targets for sabotage and disruption.

 

Last week, the Washington Post revealed that the Polish government has found evidence that Russia’s military-intelligence agency, the GRU, recruited refugees from Eastern Europe and tried to get them to hide tracking devices in military cargo, and then ordered them to derail trains carrying weapons to Ukraine. An official with Poland’s Internal Security Agency — the Agencja Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego — told the paper that certain recruits had been assigned to carry out arson attacks and an assassination.

 

Beyond the roads and rails, the single most important hub of activity for getting both military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine is Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, about 60 miles from the Ukrainian border and about 100 miles east of the city from which I’m writing this newsletter. U.S. and allied planes, including C-17 Globemaster, A400M Atlas, and C-130 Hercules cargo planes, regularly land and unloading weapons and supplies. The runways are protected by Patriot-missile batteries, visible from the road to the airport; while it may have the equivalent of a NATO air base operating on its runways, the airport still offers civilian flights to Warsaw and Gdansk.

 

The Russian government won’t bomb or attack any of these sites directly, but its leaders sure as hell would love to figure out some way to cause disruptions here without leaving any fingerprints.

 

In addition to the accusations of attempted sabotage, Russian cyberattacks have targeted Polish news sites, government and military entities, and the country’s tax-service website. One study concluded that since the Russian invasion began, Poland has been targeted by cyberattacks more often than any other country in Europe.

 

Poland is about as close to the Russia–Ukraine war as you can get without being in it, both geographically and psychologically. (Every now and then the war spills over, as in November 2022 when a Ukrainian air-defense missile crossed the border and struck a Polish grain plant, killing two people.) Spending the entire Cold War under the boot of the Soviet Union left the Poles with a keen sense of the threat posed by Russian military aggression — and how hard it can be to regain independence and freedom once it is lost.

 

Just a few days ago, Zbigniew Rau, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, declared on Twitter:

 

Europe needs to do more for its security to repel any conventional aggression in the future. We must pull all allies in this direction and effectively boost defense spending. Let’s establish a “coalition of the delivering” within NATO. A group of allies leading by example and spending at least 2 percent on defense. You can count on Poland in this much-needed endeavor! I look forward to seeing every NATO member state meeting this requirement.

 

If all U.S. allies were like the Poles, we would have less to worry about.

 

Poland sent $4.5 billion in military, economic, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine from the start of the war until May 31, 2023, according to the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker. That ranks the Poles sixth in the world by total amount of support given, and fourth in the world by support given as a percentage of GDP.

 

One of the points I hadn’t mentioned in last week’s discussion of foreign governments’ aid to Ukraine is the number of refugees taken in by each country. The Kiel Institute numbers are only measuring direct government-to-government aid. As of April this year, Poland had taken in 1.56 million refugees, more than Germany (a little over 1 million), the Czech Republic (about a half million), Italy (171,000), Spain (168,000), the United Kingdom (164,000), France (118,000), Slovakia (111,000), and Romania (110). Keep in mind, Slovakia and Romania share borders with Ukraine.

 

Lest you be told that the United States is being overrun by Ukrainian refugees, from February 2022 to April of this year, the U.S. accepted 271,000 Ukrainian refugees. (More than half of the nearly 124,000 applications filed by Americans seeking to sponsor Ukrainians fleeing the war in their homeland have come from households in just five states: New York, Illinois, California, Washington State, and Florida.) In other words, the U.S. has taken in roughly 17 percent of the refugees that Poland has welcomed.

 

Technically, Russia claims it has taken in 2.8 million Ukrainian refugees, but it’s tough to verify those numbers and figure out how many are actually Ukrainians who have been forcibly abducted to Russian soil.

 

The influx of refugees into Poland since early 2022 has not spurred a broad backlash from native Poles; by and large, Poles see the Ukrainians as beneficial to their country:

 

The survey by Ipsos for OKO.press and TOK FM, published today, found that 62 percent of Poles agree it would be “good for Poland if Ukrainian refugees were to stay for many years”. Only 27 percent disagreed. There are currently estimated to be over a million refugees from Ukraine in Poland.

 

In five polls conducted by Ipsos on this subject since May 2022, between 57 percent and 69 percent of Poles have declared a positive attitude towards the long-term stay of refugees from Ukraine in Poland, with only 24 percent to 30 percent expressing negative views.

 

Considering that other surveys have found Poles less enthusiastic about immigrants from outside Europe, the Poles may well see the Ukrainians as culturally like themselves and a good fit for the existing Polish culture. Lviv, the sixth-largest city in Ukraine, which sits not far from the Polish border, was part of Poland for stretches of its history.

 

A new survey indicates that in the past year, Polish support for assisting Ukraine has declined somewhat, from 83 percent to 65 percent. It is probably worth noting that those least enthusiastic about helping Ukraine also do not seem enthusiastic about voting. “Neutrality is also more likely to be desired by those who are politically less engaged — for example, mentioning in our survey that they do not intend to vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections.”

 

And those parliamentary elections are now less than two months away. Polish president Andrzej Duda announced parliamentary elections would be held October 15, with both the 460-seat lower house of parliament and the 100-seat senate at stake. Polls currently indicate that Duda’s Law and Justice Party, the right-of-center party which has governed Poland since 2015, is on pace to win the most seats but is likely to fall short of an outright majority in parliament. Duda and his party are looking for an unprecedented third term. It is likely that Duda will be running on a national-security-themed message, touting his defense buildup. He recently oversaw the country’s largest military parade in Warsaw since the Cold War and declared, “The goal of this huge modernization is to equip Poland’s armed forces and create such a defense system that no one ever dares attack us, that Polish soldiers will never need to fight.”

 

The party that is currently on pace to win the second most seats is Koalicja Obywatelska, or KO, the “Civic Coalition,” a mish-mash of center-left, center-right, and center-center parties all unified in their opposition to the Law and Justice Party.

 

The party that is currently expected to win the third-most seats is Konfederacja (Confederation), described as a coalition of nationalist, far-right-populist parties.

 

Some Western observers worry that Konfederacja will throw a monkey-wrench into the results and win enough seats to end up in a kingmaker position.

 

Mikolaj Bronert of the German Marshall Fund writes:

 

Konfederacja is even more resolute in its negative view of Polish Atlanticism. Konfederacja Member of Parliament Robert Winnicki has argued that the US military presence in Poland demonstrates the country’s “vassalization”. Similarly, Konfederacja’s leaders have taken the lead in criticizing the volume of Polish military assistance to Ukraine. Winnicki has remarked that NATO’s eastern-flank countries should not be the ones to champion military support for Ukraine. Instead, allies that “are not located next to the Russian border” should play a greater role. While in principle Konfederacja’s leadership is not against military support for Ukraine, the scope of Polish support is too ambitious in their view and will lead to the “demilitarization of Poland”. Winnicki has stated that “Poland must support Ukraine without weakening its own defensive capabilities.”

 

Konfederacja is also staunchly anti-Ukrainian in its rhetoric. Ever since Russia annexed Crimea, politicians affiliated with the coalition have attempted to justify Russia’s actions. Janusz Korwin-Mikke, one of Konfederacja’s frontmen, argues that Poland should recognize the annexation of the peninsula. He is also not persuaded of Russia’s threat to Europe, stating that “Ukraine is Poland’s enemy, not Russia.”

 

Bronert writes that while Polish governments have been politically diverse over the past three decades, there’s been a broad consensus about supporting other Eastern European countries in moving in a more Western-democratic direction, and maintaining strong ties to the U.S. and its allies. But “Konfederacja is the first political entity with a realistic prospect of breaking this 30-year-old consensus.”

 

Two referenda will also appear on the ballot along with the parliamentary seats. One will ask Polish voters whether they “support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa under the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy.” Voters will also be asked whether they support the dismantling of a wall recently built along the border with Belarus.

 

By and large, Ukraine and Poland have been steadfast allies since the beginning of the war, although there is a continuing disagreement about Ukrainian grain being sent through Poland. Last month, Russians bombed the port facilities in Odessa, Ukraine, putting an exclamation point on Putin’s decision to withdraw from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a wartime deal that was supposed to enable Ukraine’s exports to reach many countries facing the threat of hunger. Ukraine’s agriculture minister said the port facilities would take a year to repair.

 

The first complication is that moving the grain by truck or train cannot really replace the scale, speed, and efficiency of container ships. (Readers of the short story Saving the Devil know that eastern Europe and central Europe have different widths of train tracks, and the railway gauge in Ukraine is about ten centimeters wider than the gauge in Poland. All of the grain would have to be moved into new containers, or the containers moved onto train cars with a narrower base.) The second complication is that Polish farmers fear that Ukrainian grain could flood the market and bring prices down, and the Polish government intends to keep a ban on the import of such grain in place when the rest of the European Union lifts its bans next month.

 

Before Russia ended the Black Sea Grain Initiative by blowing up the ports, the program had exported almost 33 million metric tons of grain and other foodstuffs — mostly corn, to make room for the incoming wheat crop, and mostly moving on to developing countries such as Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, and Djibouti. The U.S. is in talks to get the grain out through the Danube River by October.