Why’d Ukraine Renege On Its Drones-For-MiGs Deal With Poland?

Ukraine now falsely perceives Poland as a post-conflict security threat that it’d be stupid to arm.

The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov was fact-checked on X for claiming that “Ukraine was hoping to replenish its [fleet] with up to nine Mig-29s being decommissioned by Poland, but that deal was suspended by Warsaw amid the overall quarrel between the two nations.” The reality, as the community note made clear, is that the deal “is on hold pending Ukraine’s fulfillment of a drone technology sharing agreement with Poland and unwillingness to fund modernizations.”

Several days later, Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz confirmed to local media that this was indeed the case. In his words, “I proposed a very clear, and I think very partnership-based, approach. MiGs for drones. The Ukrainians initially accepted this and didn’t implement it, so there are no MiGs for Ukraine because there are no drones or drone capabilities.” He also quipped that Ukraine’s sale of drones to the Gulf proves that it has the production capability required for fulling its deal with Poland.

These facts therefore raise the question of why Ukraine reneged on its drones-for-MiGs deal with Poland. While casual observers might chalk it up to Zelensky playing to his increasingly Polonophobic domestic audience after transforming Ukraine into an indisputably anti-Polish state upon glorifying the Volhynia Genocide’s OUN-UPA culprits at the state level, the real reason is arguably much more sinister: Ukraine now falsely perceives Poland as a post-conflict security threat that it’d be stupid to arm.

Readers can learn more about that scenario in this review of Przemysław Piasta’s recent article here, which was published several days before “A Senior Ukrainian Sergeant Threatened Poland With Drone Strikes Against Its Cities” after earlier alleging that Poland is plotting to partition Ukraine with Russia. This sentiment is becoming common among Ukrainians amidst their country’s UPA dispute with Poland. It’s therefore possible that Ukraine might strike first after the hot phase of its conflict with Russia ends.

As was mentioned in the two analyses above, this could take the form of supporting a terrorist-separatist insurgency in the southeastern Polish lands that Ukrainian nationalists claim as their own. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are much larger than Poland’s but would probably rely on traumatized veterans during the first phase for “plausible deniability”. They could put their drone experience to use terrorizing nearby Polish cities to cripple the state’s writ over the region before declaring “reunification” with Ukraine.

If Poland sends troops to “Zakerzonia”, as Ukrainian nationalists call it, then that could be the tripwire for a conventional Ukrainian intervention with drone swarms to create a “kill zone” blocking them from there. Ukraine’s drone superiority over Poland is key to this scenario, but it would be broken if Ukraine implemented the drones-for-MiGs deal after perceiving Poland as a post-conflict security threat. To be clear, that’s a false perception, but it’s arguably the tacit justification for reneging on the aforesaid deal.

Accordingly, just like it would be stupid for Ukraine to arm Poland with this false perception in mind, so too was it even stupider for Poland to arm Ukraine without any strings attached from the get-go during Kiev’s most desperate weeks when no one else rushed to help it. Poland could have successfully coerced Ukraine to abandon Banderism, which is a much more anti-Polish ideology than an anti-Soviet/-Russian or anti-Jewish one, but it didn’t and must now contend with the post-conflict threat posed by Ukraine.