Poland’s Rotating Council Of The EU Presidency Is A Chance To Rebalance Relations With Ukraine
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.
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.
Poles often suffer from delusions of grandeur.
Master is just not that into you.
It seems that the American and German masters are done with Poland for good, and no amount of simping to them by Tusk will alter this state of affairs which is slated to become the paradigm in the years to come. Starting from the medieval days when Ostrogothic colonists and their German Friar successors out on a deracination rampage into Slavic lands first employed Poland as their no-holds barred unscrupulous hunting hound for vanquishing the Baltic realms and Russia, Germans have never quite really held Poles in any degree of high esteem, but only reckoned them as deracinates worthy only of serfdom, bereft of self respect as would seem from their overeagerness to ingratiate themselves with imperio-feudal German overlords and disown native culture. That popular perception of Poland in Germany has endured to this day, and Poles are the subject of many an unflattering spoof or parody in German folklore. Napoleon of France and Hitler of Germany both held Poles to be a nation of concubines fit only to entertain and service west European masters. Hitler wanted Germans to avail the Polish womb as baby boomer factories for procreating an entire army of Nordic Janissaries or yesteryear suicide-bombers for conquest of Eurasia. He appreciated what he saw as the docile and effeminate warm congeniality and pleasurable companionship of a Polish female, and accordingly had assigned thousands of Polish women abducted from across Poland to German prisons for pacifying the sexual urges of the inmates. Such females, nicknamed wives of the prison, often had to service men as frequently as one partner every 5 minutes during duty hours. Poland's German handlers today both rejoice and balk at Poland's astonishingly slavish servitude to Germany and its collective amnesia for the cultural holocaust wrought over 4 centuries by Germans in Poland at the turn of the 1st millenium AD. But how can Germany afford the luxury of treating Poland like use and throw toilet paper even in this day and hour? For one, Poland is not that crucial by way of much tauted "geographical indispensability" to furtherance of German economic hegemony over Ukraine, because Romania, Czechia, Slovakia, Bulgaria et al can be roped in to fulfil that role just as well if not faring better. The exclusion of Poland from spoils of the melon at the Berlin conference is indicative of an abiding pattern. Even Germany is likely to plummet into a spiralling economic downslide in the next half decade which would seriously compromise its ability to pamper its lackeys in the EU by subsidising the latters' bills. The new government which will soon assume office in Washington is determined to reclaim American dominance over Europe in respect of high end research IPR's and manufacturing prowess under the MAKE AMERICA GREAT dictum, and it does not help the German cause that Blackrock alumnus Merz is slated to take over the reins in Berlin soon. The only saving grace for any dispensation in Warsaw, be it liberal globalist or conservative nationalist, consists in mending relations with Russia in sincere earnest and stop playing spoilport as Washington's sniper, else there is a Tsunami of historical wrongs wreaked by Poland on Ukrainian nation and society whose payback time is about to come.
An incumbent leader of the “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists”, Bogdan Chervak, has warned Poland that “Poles are playing with fire” in their renewed interest in resurrecting preWorld War Polish irredentism according to which ultranationist Poles claim ownership rights over vast swathes of western Ukraine which had been conquered by Poland for brief periods on repeated occasions starting with the days of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry “Kuleba too reaffirmed the popular Ukrainian perception that the mountainous Carpathian territories in the southeast of present-day Poland, which had formed part of historic Ukraine until relatively recent times and from which ethnic Ukrainians were forcibly expelled and resettled, retain the status of “Ukrainian territories”. This prompted a strong demarche from leaders of the ruling Polish coalition in Warsaw.
British social anthropologist Chris Hann’s from the Max Plank Institute, has grudgingly admitted that “According to the historical ethno-linguistic and religious criteria generally considered central in the formation of peoples, Ukraine might indeed have a stronger claim to sections of the Polish Carpathians than it has to Crimea or Donbas.” In all probability it seems prudent to recognise Ukraine's historical claim to former Ukrainian lands which now form part of south-eastern Poland, going by the universally accepted paradigm of self-determination which had legitimised and sanctified the secession of Kosovo from Serbia.
Because of growing popular outrage in Ukraine against radical anti-Ukrainian sentiments brewing in Polish society, including demands to ban Ukrainian food-grain imports and entry of ethnic Ukrainian refugees into Poland, Ukraine has begun exacting its retribution on Poland by secretly lobbying with its western partners such as Germany and the USA, to exclude Poland from the lucrative endgame of participation in major postwar reconstruction contracts in Ukraine, much of which have already been awarded on a platter to Blackwater nominees. Poland however maintains that the Polish resentment against Ukrainian refugees is fuelled purely by socio-economic considerations of fear of Ukrainian irredentism and financial losses to Polish farmers. In any case, Poland seems slated to loose a big chunk of the pie at the fag end of the day, in lust for which it has undertaken its undeclared ongoing military adventurism in Ukraine in cahoots with NATO, as things seem from what transpired at the Berlin Summit.
The pervasive perception among Ukrainian public is that they are being sacrificed by the Zelensky regime as cannon fodder on the altar of greedy intrigues pulled by Zio-oligarchic multinational American players and are being forcibly drafted against the collective popular will, with both tacit and active connivance from Poland. Polish army goons have already been spotted as ringleaders of a quasi-Mafiosi syndicate terrorising unwilling Ukrainian conscripts in newly cropped up NATO training camps across Ukaine via brutal hazing, even as Polish border guards have been turning back thousands of Ukrainians civilians including men in their fifties who try to escape Ukraine for evading forcible army draft every day.