WARSAW — Two decades ago, when Poland supported the United States in the controversial war that led to the Iraq war, the French president rebuked Warsaw, saying it had “missed a good opportunity to be silent.” .
Today, no one – but Russia – tells Poland to keep quiet, at least not because of the war in Ukraine.
With President Biden making his second visit to Warsaw since the war began last February, and the Polish capital set to host Wednesday’s summit meeting of leaders from nine countries in… NATO’s eastern flank, Poland has found its voice.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Tuesday in an interview: “Clearly the focus has shifted to Poland and other countries in Central Europe.
Poland, which joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2014, is delighted to no longer be referred to as the “new Eastern member” of the European bloc and the military alliance of Western members. veterans like France and Germany.
“I see that we are being heard more and more about what is going on around us,” Mr. Morawiecki said. “I find that on the security challenge, we are understood in a better way,”
He recalled that before Russian President Vladimir V. Putin sent troops into Ukraine, Warsaw’s resolute warnings about the threat posed by Moscow and about Europe’s dependence on its energy supply ” only half heard.
Since the war started, Germany has abandoned its previous Moscow-friendly policies and also heavily dependent on Russian natural gas. At the same time, Poland became a transit point for Western arms flowing into Ukraine, a haven for millions of Ukrainian refugees, and a driving force behind European sanctions against Russia.
“All governments have acknowledged that my government was right towards Russia, given all the threats related to the Russian-German gas relationship,” Morawiecki said. He said former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Russia policies were “completely wrong.”
In a speech in Warsaw on Tuesday, President Biden praised Poland as “one of our great allies, praising its reception of refugees from Ukraine and the important role it played in the West’s unified response to the conflict.” Russian invasion.
“Thank you Poland. Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you are doing.”
However, while acknowledging that Poland has become a pivot around which much of that response now hinges, some foreign policy experts worry that it may not be quite ready for the moment. important.
In particular, they cite domestic political battles ahead of national elections this fall and the protracted disputes between Poland’s right-wing ruling party, Law and Justice, and the European Union. . The changes are mainly related to the judicial system, which critics say threatens the independence of courts and judicial bodies. government’s insistence that Polish law is superior to some European law.
Piotr Buras, head of the Warsaw office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said in a report this week: “Polish leaders should be careful not to overdo it. “Admiration in Europe for Warsaw’s achievements could easily turn nasty if ethical leadership turned into self-righteousness.”
There has been discontent in Germany about the Law and Justice party’s revival of the issue of reparations for World War II, an issue Berlin considers long closed. Poland is insisting that Germany still owes over a trillion dollars for the holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany.
German bashing is popular with the conservative political base of Poland’s ruling party but sometimes disrupts diplomatic and military cooperation between the two countries.
When Germany supplied the Patriot air defense system to Poland in November, the defense minister in Warsaw quickly accepted the offer with thanks. However, a few days later, the grumpy leader of Poland’s ruling party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said that although the German offer was ‘interesting’, it would have been better if Berlin had sent missiles to Ukraine, one thing didn’t start as it would involve sending German missiles. soldiers entering Ukraine. The Polish Defense Minister quickly abandoned the initial welcome given to the German Patriots.
Poland’s main opposition party, the Citizens Platform, jumped into the quagmire, accusing Mr Kaczyinski of playing around with his party’s often anti-German base and insisting he was “going crazy”. Rzeczpospolita, a reputable daily, said that Germany’s proposal to send missiles to Ukraine instead of Poland was “shocking” and undermined “Poland’s credibility and worst of all, its security”.
Morawiecki, Poland’s prime minister, denied that domestic politics were behind the mixed signals and said Poland was just trying to accommodate President Volodymyr Zelensky’s longstanding request for Patriot missiles.
Roman Kuzniar, professor of strategic and international studies at the University of Warsaw and a senior State Department official under the previous opposition-led government, says the war in Ukraine has clearly advanced Poland’s role as a geopolitical player. However, he said, “this role is much less than it should be because we are also at war with Europe” over the rule of law and “continuously at war with Germany.”
Despite the contradiction, Poland played an important role in persuading Germany to agree to send some Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine and to allow other European countries, including Poland, to send some Advanced German-made tanks.
“At first, only we were willing to send Leopard tanks, but we managed to convince Germany and other countries to do the same,” Morawiecki said.
He said that Poland has already sent 250 older-style tanks to Ukraine and that it will send 14 Leopards as soon as the Ukrainian teams finish their training, as well as 60 PT-91s, an existing type of battle tank. Great Poland. Some other countries are now lagging, he lamented, despite previous commitments.
More surprising than Poland’s frictions with Germany is the rift that has opened during Ukraine’s war with Hungary, where authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orban has long been seen as a fellow countryman by Poland’s ruling party. They still share many of the same views on the European Union — mostly negative when it comes to issues like the rule of law and LGBT rights — and the need to protect traditional Christian values, but There were marked differences on the Ukraine issue.
“I completely disagree with his views on war,” Morawiecki said of Orban, who has refused to supply Ukraine with weapons through his territory and cooperated with the Kremlin in his pursuit of energy. cheap quantity.
However, he noted that Hungary has so far supported European sanctions against Russia, despite repeated condemnation.
Behind the noise created by Poland’s highly polarized domestic political scene is a broad consensus on the need to support Ukraine. This has allowed the government to increase spending on the military, which currently accounts for about 3% of gross domestic product, far exceeding the 2% target set by NATO but missed by most members of the alliance.
Morawiecki said that if weapons and other military equipment ordered by the government will arrive this year. this number will reach 4 percent. “This would be the highest of all NATO countries, including the United States, as a percentage of GDP,” he said. The United States spends 3.3% of GDP on the military.
Perhaps the clearest measure of how much Poland is doing to support Ukraine is the fury it has aroused in Moscow, including from Dmitri Medvedev, the former Russian president and now vice-president of the council. Putin’s security.
In a bombastic social media post last year, Mr. Medvedev denounced the Polish leaders as “vassals” of the United States who simply wanted to “swear allegiance to their lord” in Washington. . “Now the interests of Polish citizens have been sacrificed to the Russian phobia of these insignificant politicians and their puppeteers from across the ocean with obvious signs of the disease,” he said. dementia due to old age.
However, becoming a target for the Russian vitriol, in the eyes of many Poles and fellow Europeans, only confirmed Poland’s status as an important country.
This has not stopped the Polish government’s protracted disputes with the European Union, whose executive body announced last week that it will take Warsaw to the European Court of Justice for its 2015 ruling. 2021 of the Supreme Court of Poland effectively challenges the primacy of European law.
The Polish court ruling has stirred alarm in some areas that Poland has set itself on a path that could one day lead to “Polexit,” a Polish version of Britain’s departure. block “Brexit”.
Morawiecki says that won’t happen. He called it “a complete lie” concocted by the opposition.
February 21, 2023
:
An earlier version of this article misdates a Polish Supreme Court ruling that effectively challenged the primacy of European law. That’s in 2021, not 2001.
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