WARSAW — When President Biden lands in Poland on Friday, he will arrive in a country that has become a central player in Europe’s conflict with Russia.
More than two million Ukrainians have fled to Poland since the Russian invasion began a month ago. Arms shipments from the West mostly go to Ukraine via Poland. Injured Ukrainian soldiers are evacuated to Polish hospitals.
And after more than a decade of warning against Russian imperial ambitions, Poland is now poised to play a central role in shaping NATO defense policy and the West’s response to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A number of allies – including those who previously dismissed Poland’s security concerns – are already taking steps the country has been pushing for years: imposing tougher sanctions on Russia, increasing military spending and endorsing a larger military presence on Poland’s eastern edge, according to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
“Poland’s role is absolutely crucial,” said Paweł Szrot, head of the Chancellery of Polish President Andrzej Duda. “It is very sad that after the war and Russian aggression, Europe and the world had to admit that Poland was right.”
Vice-President Kamala Harris met with Polish President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw during her recent three-day trip to Poland and Romania.
Photo: Janek Skarzynski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Mr Szrot said he expected Messrs Duda and Biden to discuss strengthening NATO’s defenses as well as helping Poland deal with the refugee crisis. “Real strengthening of NATO’s eastern flank,” said Mr. Szrot, outlining Polish hopes for the meeting. “New powers. New gear.”
Until the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Mr Szrot’s nationalist Law and Justice party – which has taken steps to undermine the independence of the country’s courts – was viewed by some Western allies as an unreliable partner. On the campaign trail, Mr Biden listed Poland alongside Belarus and Hungary in “the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world”.
But the war has prompted Poland to recalibrate its relations with the West.
There is now broad agreement within NATO to send the reinforcements requested by Poland. Concerns about the country’s court system and its rule of law, which had upset Poland’s relations with other European Union countries, were not an impediment.
The past few weeks have been humbling for western Europeans, who have been forced to admit their view of Russia was wrong, while former Soviet bloc countries have seen the situation clearer, said Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In particular, Germany pursued a policy of “change through trade,” hoping new energy deals with Moscow would help export liberal values to Russia and brushing off complaints from Poland that Europe was becoming too dependent on a hostile government’s gas.
“Now we can see that these people we’ve looked down on for so long actually know a thing or two,” Ms. Braw said.
An Italian military transport plane at the airport in Rzeszow, Poland, near the border with Ukraine earlier this month.
Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
American soldiers in Poland earlier this month. The country plays a central role in shaping NATO defense policy.
Photo: Omar Marques/Getty Images
For Poland and other central European nations, caution grew out of a history of fighting Russian incursions stretching back hundreds of years.
Tsarist Russia annexed parts of Poland in the 1790s. Poland only regained full independence after World War I, and then quickly faced an invading Bolshevik army which it was able to repulse, halting the spread of the revolution westward. The Soviet Union, working with Nazi Germany, invaded the country during World War II and imposed communist rule after 1945. Poland was the first country to leave Europe after holding democratic elections in 1989, hastening a wave of social movements that led to the fall of the Soviet Union.
Measured in terms of gross domestic product per capita, Poland was about as poor as Ukraine at the time. But while Ukraine languished in Russia’s orbit, Poland pushed west, letting state-owned companies fail, joining NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004, and earning freedom to travel and trade across the continent. GDP per capita is now four times that of Ukraine. Poland has become the model for what Ukraine’s pro-European majority believes their country could achieve if admitted to the EU.
At a meeting between President Biden and NATO leaders in Brussels, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine – an option allies have ruled out – would require massive attacks on Russian forces and escalate the risk of a wider conflict . Photo: Reuters
Once inside the bloc, Poland became the loudest voice arguing that post-communist Russia continued to pose a threat to the nations of Eastern Europe – particularly Ukraine, whose NATO membership aspirations Poland supported. The way to confront Russia, several Polish governments have argued, is with US-backed military might, not economic engagement.
During Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, the Polish president traveled to the country’s capital with leaders of Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, where he warned Western allies of Russian aggression.
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“Today Georgia, tomorrow Ukraine, the day after tomorrow – the Baltic States and later maybe the time will come for my country, Poland,” said then Polish President Lech Kaczyński in his speech. “We are here to ensure that the world responds even more strongly, especially the European Union and NATO.”
At the time, many allies dismissed his concerns as outdated Cold War thinking.
President Obama canceled a planned missile shield in Poland the next year while seeking to restore ties with Mr Putin. The Russian president managed to turn central European leaders who had once been anti-communist dissidents – Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Czech President Milos Zeman – into political allies. Germany opened a pipeline to import Russian gas in 2011 and agreed to build a second pipeline in 2015 despite Polish and Ukrainian objections. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel invented sanctions after the annexation of Crimea, which eastern countries criticized as too soft.
Although NATO’s stance began to change after the 2014 invasion of Crimea, Polish officials have continued to complain that there are not enough NATO troops in the country.
“I’ve been to so many meetings where the Polish side has said to German politicians, ‘You can’t be so naive… Russia is a threat you need to be on the lookout for,'” said Adam Traczyk, Associate Fellow at of the German Society for Foreign Relations, which researches German-Polish relations. As a result, Mr Traczyk said, Polish leaders now believe they have the upper hand in their relations with Western Europe: “Poland was right and Germany was wrong.”
Germany makes a U-turn on Russia, pledges $100 billion in new military spending and begins examining ways to wean itself off Russian oil.
Refugees from Ukraine queued at a border crossing in Medyka in eastern Poland last month.
Photo: Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Poland, meanwhile, is trying to establish itself as a pioneer in the defense of Eastern Europe. Dissidents from the neighboring dictatorship of Belarus are welcome. Immigrants from Georgia built a large community in Warsaw after the 2008 Russian invasion. Last week Polish officials visited Kyiv, where they called for a NATO peacekeeping mission in Ukraine – a move most members of the alliance are unwilling to take.
The attitude towards Ukrainian refugees is a reversal from 2015, when Poland refused to take refugees from Syria while Germany took in more than a million. Since 2015, when the Law and Justice party won a majority in parliament, Poland has adopted a range of policies that much of the West sees as illiberal and undemocratic.
The party has been criticized by the West for attempts to tighten control of the country’s media and for its stance against LGBT rights. The government has also taken steps to limit the independence of the judiciary, and the country’s top court has since ruled that some EU laws may not apply in Poland. In response, Brussels has tied the disbursement of EU funds to the rule of law. During this week’s parliamentary session, the government will discuss bills aimed at restoring the independence of the judiciary.
“This is a defining moment for Poland,” said Max Bergmann, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Poland can say: ‘We have to focus on Russia because it poses a threat to democracy in Ukraine.’ But they cannot turn against Russia and then undermine democracy at home. I think that’s going to be a big part of President Biden’s message when he comes.”
—Daniel Michaels contributed to this article.
write to Ian Lovett at [email protected] and Drew Hinshaw at [email protected]
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