Poland wants more than just platitudes from the West
The US President’s visit to Poland wasn’t particularly dangerous or daring but it was symbolic.
Air Force One delivered Joe Biden to the Polish border town of Rzeszow on Saturday, within 65km of NATO’s frontline with Ukraine.
It has served as a logistics hub for Western arms and humanitarian help to the towns and cities under Russian fire, and as a haven for tens of thousands fleeing daily for their lives.
The US President’s visit wasn’t particularly dangerous or daring but it was symbolic. A day of intensive summitry in Brussels on Thursday was scripted to produce an impression of Western unity and resolve. Yet NATO, the G7 and the EU couldn’t agree how to change the behaviour of an invader setting the neighbourhood ablaze. What is worth fighting for? How do you threaten an assailant without provoking him into doing something worse?
Poland, now described by US officials as an “indispensable ally”, speaks for NATO’s eastern allies when it proposes ways of mounting a forward defence. If a no-fly zone over Ukraine is not feasible, how about supplying MiG-29 fighters, Soviet-era planes that wouldn’t require long pilot training? No, say the Americans. Why not an international peacekeeping force to police humanitarian corridors? No, too risky, says the US. Shut European ports to Russian shipping? Stop road transport across the Polish-Belarus border, where hundreds of trucks have been hauling goods through the EU to Minsk – and then perhaps on to Russian army supply depots? No, no, no.
Some of these questions are addressed to Biden; some to the EU, and Germany in particular. The summitry exposed the gulf between eastern alliance members and those in the west of Europe, who are more concerned about the political instability that could arise from the cost-of-living crisis.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the glaring contradiction between targeted financial sanctions against the Putin regime and the huge amount that is being handed over for Russian oil and gas. More than 40 per cent of the Russian budget is financed by revenue from the export of energy. That pays for a lot of ammunition and war-fighting. “Europe has enough gas to get to next winter,” says Oleg Ustenko, chief economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “and the International Energy Agency has laid out a viable plan for conservation and alternative supplies which would reduce European imports of Russian gas by more than one third.”
Payments for Russian gas, he suggests, should go into escrow accounts so that proceeds cannot be used to buy arms.
In some ways Poland is acting as an amplifier for the Zelensky government within the alliance. It has taken more than 2.1 million refugees from Ukraine, and there is little doubt that domestic political trouble could lie ahead, and no one who watched the dour way that the German parliament listened to the Ukrainian President’s plea for help last week can really doubt his need for a champion.
Poland wants more from Biden than congratulatory words and the promise of more NATO troops. And it wants more than a tacit recognition of Poland’s regional leaders. At a time when Putin is trying to destroy a nation state, it wants a radical reappraisal of what it means to be an eastern partner on the western border of the alliance.
For a while, the Biden team regarded the Polish government with suspicion, as a kindred spirit of Donald Trump. That has changed. It is on the frontline and it wants to be sure the US, Germany and other allies have its back.
The Times
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