The Polish Defense Minister’s Claim About The Opposition’s Defense Policy Is Disingenuous

It's one thing to draw attention to a prior administration’s objectively reckless national security policy and another to deliberately deceive the masses less than a month before the next elections into thinking that the opposition “planned to hand over half” of the country back when they ran the government.

Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak claimed that the “Civic Platform” (PO) opposition planned to surrender half of their country to Russia if it invaded as part of their defense policy the last time that they were in power. In his words, “I often wondered why the PO government liquidated units in the east of our country. And we have the answer, that's why. Because the real defense was planned on the Vistula River, that is, it was planned to hand over half of Poland into the hands of the occupier.”

His allegation conforms with the ruling “Law & Justice” (PiS) party’s efforts to frame the next elections on 15 October as being all about national security, but also relevantly follows PO’s attempts to expose PiS’ hypocrisy on Russia and Muslim immigration, both of which are national security issues. In pursuit of the first goal, PiS hyped up fear that PO is plotting to implement a post-modern Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in parallel with opening the floodgates to unlimited immigration from civilizationally dissimilar countries.

As for the second, the PO-dominated Senate recently created its own “Russian influence commission” for investigating Poland’s continued business with Russia under PiS after the ruling party was the first to unveil such a body earlier this summer for investigating the former PO government’s ties with Russia. PO is also ensuring that the public doesn’t forget about the latest immigration scandal where corrupt diplomats are accused of selling tens of thousands of visas to people from Muslim-majority countries.

Having been placed on the narrative backfoot as a result of PO’s “counteroffensive”, it was therefore predictable in hindsight that PiS would double down on its national security platform in one way or another, which took the form of Blaszczak accusing PO of wanting to surrender half of Poland to Russia. As supposed proof of his claim, he shared what he presented as newly declassified documents from 2011 purporting to be the country’s top-secret contingency plans from that time.

According to him, they “would have resulted in tragedies for the civilian population”. By contrast, Blaszczak claimed, “We are strengthening the Polish army to deter the aggressor so that Russia does not attack Poland. Only PiS guarantees the security of our country.” This is a disingenuous description, however, since the continental security situation was completely different back then than it is today. For instance, the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 was still in effect, which limited military deployments.

Accordingly, NATO wouldn’t have been able to help Poland right away in the event that the far-fetched scenario of a Russian invasion unfolded, though it should also be said that Russia likely wouldn’t have been able to secretly assemble all its forces in preparation of such a sneak attack in that case either. Left unsaid is that Russia wouldn’t seriously consider invading Poland anyhow since that would trigger the tripwire of direct US involvement via Article 5 and possibly lead to the use of nuclear weapons.

Even if one is conducting a thought exercise about this scenario for whatever reason, then it still wouldn’t make sense for Poland’s comparatively smaller, less-equipped, and more poorly experienced troops to risk destruction on their eastern border before NATO reinforcement arrive. Rather, it’s much more pragmatic to pull them back beyond a geographic barrier like the Vistula to buy time for the alliance’s counterattack, provided of course that the conflict hadn’t yet gone nuclear by that time.

What Blaszczak wants to mislead average Poles into thinking is that PO was in the process of implementing a post-modern Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact but was only prevented from doing so by PiS coming to power after the 2015 parliamentary elections. The obvious hole in this narrative is that Russia made absolutely no attempt to invade Poland during PO’s rule, which coincided with the “EuroMaidan” coup in Kiev, the Crimean Crisis, and the start of the Ukrainian Civil War in Donbass.

It's one thing to draw attention to a prior administration’s objectively reckless national security policy and another to deliberately deceive the masses less than a month before the next elections into thinking that the opposition “planned to hand over half” of the country back when they ran the government. PiS is clearly desperate to distract from the pressure that PO’s put upon it in recent weeks by exposing its hypocrisy on national security issues, which explains the reason behind Blaszczak’s disingenuous claim.