The defacement of Kropka was not an isolated incident. Around the same time, similar graffiti appeared in front of the office of an NGO providing assistance to Belarusian refugees, even as a Belarusian cultural center in Vilnius was vandalized, and an air gun was fired at a Belarusian Orthodox chapel in the Lithuanian capital, leaving bullet holes in its grill-guarded glass windows. If, however, Furmanaŭ was momentarily terrified as the assault on his shop, recalling the ethnic cleansing and genocide that devoured the Baltics in the Second World War, the former Belarusian political prisoner soon realized what he was really looking at, realizing the assault was a “provocation” by the Lukashenko regime.

In April, Lithuania’s State Security Department (VSD) confirmed what Furmanaŭ had suspected — that this string of incidents had indeed been the work of Putin and his Belarusian stooge Alexander Lukashenko. Yet according to the agency, Belarusian and Russian intelligence services have now gone even further, and had started recruiting individuals to ambush and assault Belarusian students living in Lithuania, and to film themselves carrying out other violent attacks elsewhere in the country.

Three years since the start of the war in Ukraine, and four since the beginning of Lukashenko’s manufactured migration crisis along Belarus’s borders with Nato, such activity might seem hardly surprising. In March, to give one example, Lithuania accused Russia’s GRU of conducting an arson attack on an Ikea in the country. But while these local, socially incendiary, and much less high-profile actions might seem innocuous by comparison, there is much more going on in Vilnius than mere vandalism. Attacks like the one against Kropka are the real-world manifestation of a long-running fight over identity. Increasingly stoked by Moscow and Minsk, it’s now playing out on a potent historical battlefield: the legacy of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The multi-ethnic and pluralistic character of the Grand Duchy, which endured for centuries until its destruction in the late 18th century, has since given rise to a uniquely Eastern European problem. Despite its name, the fact that the state encompassed not only modern Lithuania but all of today’s Belarus means it does not easily fit into the rigid boxes of 20th century nationalism. In a region where history bestows legitimacy, the battle over who owns the inheritance of the Grand Duchy carries implications not just for how Lithuanians and Belarusians see themselves, but what territory they have the right to control.

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It is no surprise, then, that this niche corner of history has become fertile soil for geopolitical manipulation by the Kremlin and its allies, whose campaign of hybrid attacks in Vilnius aims to provoke an ethnic conflict between Lithuanians and Belarusians. In this, however, Lithuania is just the tip of the iceberg. Putinist efforts to use history to foment chaos in Vilnius are a hallmark of the Kremlin’s playbook elsewhere in the region, and a means of extending Putin’s soft power at his rivals’ expense. “These attacks are a blow not only to the safety of Belarusians in Lithuania, but also to the trust and unity between communities,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the head of the Belarusian democratic opposition tells UnHerd. “Attacking its history, its democracy, its role in the EU and Nato — it’s all part of the same imperialist playbook.”

At the core of Putin and Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare lies an ideology called Litvinism, whose most radical fringe claim that modern Lithuanians are in fact a different people entirely than the ones who dominated the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — and that therefore Vilnius should rightfully belong to Belarus. To that end, graffiti with slogans like “Vilnius is ours!” began appearing in the city last year, while in late 2023 a video even surfaced of self-described Litvinists threatening Lithuanian politicians.

“Historical conflict and historical misunderstandings offer very good ground, especially in Eastern Europe for hostility among nations,” says Vadim Vileita, a Lithuanian political scientist and linguist with Belarusian roots. “This situation with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the legacy of this old state is one of the examples of how a common heritage can not unite, but divide nations, especially in difficult geopolitical situations.”

Certainly, the Grand Duchy itself was a place of contradictions. Led by largely pagan Lithuanian leaders, in the 13th century they dramatically expanded the polity’s borders. Soon enough, their borders stretched across modern Poland, Belarus and Ukraine into Russia itself, with many of their subjects Orthodox Slavs. After the Grand Duchy and Poland fell under the sway of the same royal house, in 1386, laying the foundation for the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth two centuries later, pagan Lithuanian leaders adopted Roman Catholicism and were crowned as Polish kings. While the Lithuanian language continued to be spoken on the territory of Lithuania proper, the dominant language of literature and administration in the Grand Duchy became Ruthenian, an East Slavic language similar to modern Ukrainian and Belarusian. As if this multicultural maelstrom wasn’t enough, the Lithuanian nobility was increasingly Polonised, even as the country’s laws were drafted in Latin.

None of this would survive the convulsions of nationalism. By 1918, indeed, it would be the Poles who weaponised Litvinism, as they fought to establish the northeastern borders of the Second Polish Republic. In their view, it was Polonised inhabitants of Lithuania, who called themselves Litwini, who were the real heirs of the Grand Duchy — distinct, they claimed, from the Baltic Lithuanians trying to use the mantle of this history to carve out their own modern state. It was under this pretext that Polish General Lucjan Żeligowski captured Vilnius in 1920 and annexed it to the new Polish Republic. Never mind that Żeligowski considered himself to be a Polish Lithuanian, and indeed grew up speaking a dialect of Belarusian.

In its more modern guise, however, it is Belarusians who have assumed the mantle of Litvinism. Though adherents today hold a spectrum of views, the most extreme believers see the modern Lithuanian state as a usurper of the Grand Duchy’s legacy. By extension, that means Belarusians have the right not just to the duchy’s heritage — but also to cities like Vilnius. Just like in the past, these ideas didn’t spread organically. According to Nerijus Maliukevičius, a political scientist at Vilnius University, Litvinism remained “marginal” in Lithuanian discourse until around 2020, when an influx of Belarusians into Lithuania provided Minsk with a chance to sow mischief.

That’s ironic. For though 57,000 Belarusians live in Lithuania, most of them loathe the Lukashenko regime and indeed fled Belarus for their own safety. Yet if few Belarusians have ever even heard of Litvinism, let alone support seizing Vilnius for themselves, that hasn’t stopped Lukashenko from using history to instrumentalise elements of the Belarusian diaspora, alongside other Russian speakers in the country, to carry out his dirty work. It’s unlikely that these saboteurs-for-hire are political hardliners. Rather, they’re mostly cash-strapped individuals eager for work, providing Lukashenko with a fertile base for exploitation. “He’s a huge opportunist, that’s not a surprise,” says Hanna Liubakova, a Vilnius-based dissident who fled Belarus and now serves as a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

As so often, though, history rushes in to complicate things once more. Lukashenko, for his part, is an undiluted product of Soviet Belarus, viewing his country’s history through a distinctly Russian lens. In this Sovietised historiography, Belarusians, as Moscow’s long-lost Slavic brothers, were rescued from oppression first by the Tsar and then by Stalin.

In other words, then, Minsk’s embrace of Litvinism in Lithuania is less an ideological position than a cold, calculated cudgel of realpolitik. Even so, it is precisely Lukashenko’s Soviet heritage that has made connections to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania so appealing in the eyes of many opposition-minded Belarusians, a minority of whom have sometimes embraced Litvinist ideas themselves. Figures like Zianon Pazniak, who fled Belarus out of fear of arrest by Lukashenko in the Nineties, have made statements denouncing the modern Lithuanian state — in their eyes, Litvinism distances Belarus from Russia, but also twists Lithuania into a usurper of stolen Belarusian glory.

As Liubakova says, such people are a small minority in the Belarusian opposition. But as the Litvinist threat continues to rise, Belarusians in Lithuania are increasingly seen as a menace. The Lithuanian state last year revoked the residence permits of around 600 Belarusian on national security grounds, while the country’s spies have increased screenings of Belarusian residents. And while Lithuania’s leaders have largely welcomed the foreigners in their midst, some politicians say it’s better to be safe than sorry.

“We have no problems with Belarusians if Belarusians respect our country,” Laurynas Kasčiūnas, an MP and former defense minister, tells UnHerd. “Not all Belarusians in Lithuania are democratic, we have economic migrants, we have other people who could be used by the regime for different reasons.” Kasčiūnas recently introduced a law that will allow the state to revoke the residency of Russians who travel to Russia or Belarus over three times a month without clear reasons. Though he stresses he doesn’t have the political backing to do so, he tells UnHerd he’d have liked to extend the law to Belarusians living in Lithuania too. Though such moves by the Lithuanian state would potentially make it easier to weed out Belarusians susceptible to Lukashenko’s schemes, they could conceivably also play into his propaganda, making it easier for him to drive a wedge between Lithuanians and Belarusians.

Amid the bickering over Litvinism, meanwhile, Lithuania has much bigger fish to fry. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently wrote a foreword to a book arguing that modern Lithuania is an artificial state built on “pro-Nazi” ideology. According to Lavrov, meanwhile, the Vilnius government has “elevated the use of falsified historical narratives to the rank of state policy to stimulate anti-Russian and Russophobic sentiments.”

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Though such narratives are hardly new, it’s hard not to be reminded of Putin’s infamous 2021 essay about Ukraine. Through a selective reading of history, it makes the case that Ukrainian national identity is actually just a Westernized version of Russianness promoted by Nazis, serving as a prelude to his invasion of the country. Lithuania isn’t taking any chances — in addition to unveiling plans for a wholesale evacuation of Vilnius in the event of a Russian invasion, Lithuania is also upgrading its military transport routes to Poland via the strategic Suwałki Gap. Led by Kasčiūnas, lawmakers in parliament have also proposed following Poland’s example and building a line of fortifications along the country’s borders with Russia and Belarus.

Nor, of course, is Lithuania the only place where Russia has combined historical revisionism with hybrid attacks to make a real impact on national politics. Aside from the extreme example of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has also claimed that Moldova is an artificial state bound to Russia, undermining the security of this increasingly pro-Western state. Though the Kremlin has long organized acts of hybrid warfare and spread historical disinformation in Poland, it has yet to combine the two. But just like segments of Lithuania’s Belarusian community, Moscow may eventually encourage Poland’s large Ukrainian population to undermine the state there too, inspired by the bloody legacy of the Second World War. “The genius of this strategy, in a sense, is that you don’t need to artificially create these divisions,” Maliukevičiuss says. “They objectively exist in each society, and you just work hard on them.”

Not that the situation is hopeless. Despite Putin and Lukashenko’s best efforts, and the Lithuanian state’s countermeasures, Belarusians here mostly feel at home. For her part, Liubakova underscores how much Vilnius is doing to support Belarusians at home while putting pressure on Lukashenko’s regime abroad — something Furmanaŭ, the co-owner of Kropka, was “pleasantly surprised” to experience himself. Though the assailants remain mysterious, local politicians expressed full-throated support for the Furmanaŭs in the aftermath of last July’s attack.

Though Litvinism therefore exists on the sidelines of the Belarusian community, both in Lithuania and elsewhere, what many Belarusians ultimately crave is a new perspective on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — with a historical legacy that can be shared by Belarusians and Lithuanians alike. As Belarusians continue refining their own national self-image, after all, the Grand Duchy not only gives them an anchor to a shared regional past, it also helps them escape the Kremlin’s shadow. Whatever their varied historical grievances, that’s something most Eastern Europeans today can surely understand.

This, then, is the Europe that Putin has worked for over a quarter century to realize. And with Donald Trump soon due to leave the White House, he knows time is short to return Russia to the geopolitical position Putin thinks it deserves. Yet just across the border, the Europeans are ready too. With the American geopolitical order dead and buried, even countries that once treated the security blanket as a safety blanket have become shell-shocked realists. And so it proves: as the Russian attack finally starts, Poland’s Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System springs into action. It’s joined by hundreds of Himars, which together rain Polish hellfire down on advancing Russian troops.

Polish fighters are now in the air too. Supported by Sweden, Finland and their Baltic allies, they deny Russia air superiority above the battlefield. There are drones, too, thousands of them, autonomous bringers of death over five countries. At sea, the Swedish and Polish navies engage the Russian Baltic Fleet as it pours across the Baltic into the Gulf of Gdańsk, with Poland’s port cities in its sights. And all the while, Russian troops advance, swarming to attack weak points in their enemy’s border defenses while using artillery to cut off the highways linking the Baltics to the rest of the continent. War, in short, engulfs Europe’s east once more, even as Paris and London threaten nuclear strikes if the Russian assault persists.

This scenario isn’t a prediction. But nor is it a fantasy, for it’s exactly what security experts across Nato have long urged Europe to prepare for. It’s easy to imagine such warnings flashing before the eyes of European leaders as they watched, uninvited, from the sidelines as the US pledged to normalize bilateral relations with Moscow. Over the course of the past two weeks, certainly, the prospect of a war on Nato soil has gone from nightmarish hypothetical to an entirely conceivable possibility — if certainly not an inevitability. Admitting that is mere realism, especially from here in Warsaw.

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For while Europeans have scrambled to plan for an impending post-American future, the unspoken truth remains that there exists no viable defense model that doesn’t have Poland squarely at its heart. For years, after all, Warsaw has been planning for exactly the sort of chaos precipitated by Trump, growing its army and bolstering its industrial strength. More to the point, the country’s geography means it will have little choice but to act as the continent’s shield against whatever comes next — even though it clearly has some way to go, both logistically and strategically, if it hopes to fend off the looming Russian threat.

In the first place, Poland’s importance can be understood by its rising military prowess. With over 200,000 men under arms, it boasts the largest army of any Nato state in Europe, even as it will also soon become the continent’s premier tank power. It’s clear, moreover, that this technology is effective in the field. Back in 2023, at Nato’s Amber Lynx exercises in Orzysz, less than 100 kilometers from Poland’s border with the Russian enclave at Kaliningrad, I witnessed a simulated attack on Polish territory. On a grey April morning, troops from six Nato states used tanks, artillery, fighter jets and anti-aircraft guns — alongside PT-91 tanks and W-3 Sokół helicopters from Poland — to repel the imaginary invaders.

As that local machinery implies, Poland has the added advantage of being a relatively robust industrial power. As the fifth largest economy in the EU, and one of the fastest growing economies in the continent, Poland has invested heavily in its already sizeable industrial manufacturing sector — especially since the start of the war in Ukraine. The Huta Stalowa Wola steel mill, one of the largest machinery manufacturers in the region, has already doubled its production of military hardware since 2022, while Poland’s shipbuilding sector has also worked to modernize the country’s fleet.

Of course, having a strong army in theory still leaves the question of how to use it — and here there seems to be some disagreement. That 2023 drill imagined Nato taking on Russia inside Polish territory. But speaking after the event, a Polish general dismissed the idea that a hostile force would ever be allowed “one meter” inside the country’s borders. To that end, Poland, together with Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, have started building an interconnected network of fortifications along their borders with Russia and Belarus, together meant to compensate for the region’s lack of geographic obstacles. In Poland, these fortifications are known as “The East Shield” and will encompass everything from simple earthworks and concrete anti-tank barriers to satellite-augmented surveillance technology. In the event of an imminent Russian attack, controversial anti-personnel mines would likely be deployed too.

All of this sounds good in theory, and has a good chance of holding Russia back for a while. In the 2028 invasion scenario I sketched out above, the first part of the conflict would involve an air war, with aircraft, missiles, rockets, and drones flying in all directions. The East Shield would be a major impediment to the advance of Russian ground forces, not least given the local environment. Though Poland lies on a flat plain that has historically acted as a highway for invaders — another reason why it’ll be obliged to fight come what may, especially given it’s the only Nato member to border Ukraine, Belarus and Russia — the frontier regions to the northeast are thick with hills, swamps and forests.

But just as in Ukraine, time ultimately would not be on Warsaw’s side. After months of grinding battles, and wave after wave of the high-casualty assaults that have become Russia’s trademark, Moscow’s armies would eventually break through the fortifications. Yet Polish forces on the other side would not be able to hold them off forever. Sooner or later, then, Nato’s “not one meter” strategy would collapse. In its place, like the Zelensky government has grimly discovered, Poland would be forced to tactically retreat from battlefield to battlefield, praying that the Russians don’t find a way to break through their lines.

It would certainly help if Poland could degrade the enemy before they broke the East Shield: not just close to the border but deep within Russia itself. Yet according to Bartłomiej Kucharski, a Polish military analyst, Warsaw isn’t doing enough here. “I have an impression that in Poland limited-scale tactical thinking has won,” he explains, noting that most of its artillery investments still only have a maximum range of 300 kilometers. “However,” Kucharski adds, “direct attacks on the territory of the enemy have the largest deterrence value.”

In the past, Poland would have relied on US support to get the kit it needs — but that doesn’t seem a sure bet these days. After the chaos of recent weeks, Polish officials have done everything in their power to play it cool, touting the Trump administration’s supposed pledges not to withdraw US forces stationed in the country. But read between the lines and things start to look much less certain. Despite calling Poland a “model ally” during his visit to Warsaw earlier this month, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warned his country wouldn’t be around forever. And when Polish President Andrzej Duda met his US counterpart on the sidelines of the CPAC on Saturday, Trump arrived late and left early.

No wonder Warsaw is looking for new backers. In practice, that unsurprisingly means its fellow EU members — who obviously have far more skin in the game than Trump. A case in point came last July, when Poland embarked on the so-called European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA) with Germany, France and Italy. Meant to stimulate the production of long-range missiles across the continent, the ultimate plan is to designed to hamper Russian forces before they ever menace the East Shield.

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That’s clearly a step in the right direction, but challenges remain. As Kucharski puts it: “As a country we have the potential to create armed forces that would be able to at least temporarily stop Russia, but currently several years of work remain ahead of us.” Quite aside from the lack of long-range missiles, there’s domestic politics to contend with too. With an eye on upcoming presidential elections in May, Polish leaders have lately refused to deploy troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers, or to commit forces to a broader pan-European army. Despite Poland’s strong industrial base, meanwhile, shifting political agendas have often made it difficult for the country to take full advantage of its manufacturing potential, with MPs struggling to think holistically political, military and industrial priorities. That’s frustrating: as analysts have long noted, the capacity to further expand the military certainly exists in Poland — the only question is whether politicians can cough up the necessary cash.

Yet if immediate political concerns may hamper flexibility in the short term, no one in Polish politics can seriously imagine their country won’t be forced to play a decisive role in regional defense, both domestically and in post-war Ukraine. Regardless of the diplomatic squabbles Poland has recently had with France and the UK over the nature of Europe’s new security architecture, moreover, everyone understands that Warsaw is a partner they must count on.

All the while, Polish officials are doing everything they can to project calm, confidence and strength. And why not? Especially given its long tradition resisting Russian imperialism, this is not a nation that’ll go down without a fight. But behind the scenes, the politicians and generals are surely alarmed. What’s most horrifying for Poland about the fantastical 2028 scenario is that, even if it were to reach the peak of military preparedness, expand its manufacturing sector, and build a European coalition — in the end Russia could still triumph. As history has often proved, both in Poland and elsewhere, there are some things even the fiercest fighting spirit cannot easily overcome.

In Warsaw, however, politicians struck a rather less sycophantic tone. “The wind of history is blowing even stronger,” proclaimed Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, soon after Trump’s victory. “Poland’s leadership will rise to the occasion.” And why not? Poland already leads Europe on defence spending as a percentage of GDP, and boasts the third-largest army in Nato. And, especially if Trump makes good on his threat to abandon his transatlantic allies to their fate, the country might yet have an opportunity to become a military powerhouse right across the continent — one that could yet evoke the country’s bygone days of geopolitical dominance. 

Trump’s election is already transforming Polish politics. With the country’s 2025 presidential election looming, Sikorski, who threw his hat into the ring to become the nominee for the ruling Civic Platform party shortly before the US election, has now recalibrated his campaign around Trump’s victory. Among other things, Sikorski argues that what Poland needs now is someone with the diplomatic experience to weather the vagaries of a Trump presidency. Just as important, the foreign minister points out that he has a good working relationship with Trump, distinguishing himself from Rafał Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw and Sikorski’s rival for the job.

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In reality, though, Trump’s victory is about far more than day-to-day political bickering. For while capitals across Eastern Europe are unsurprisingly worried by the security implications of America First, they equally know that whatever happens, they’re going to have to take care of themselves. And if that means filling a US-shaped void in terms of national security, not least when it comes to Russia, the disappearance of American power may also bolster the presence of the Poles or Romanians on the wider Europe stage. 

That’s clear enough West of the Oder. The recent collapse of Olaf Scholz’s government in Germany was partly triggered by arguments over support for Ukraine and the prospect that US assistance might end, even as the chancellor has been criticised by other Nato members for speaking to Vladimir Putin for the first time in years. Not that the chaos in Berlin should surprise the generals in Tallinn or Sofia. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Nato’s centre of gravity has gradually shifted eastwards. It’s no coincidence that ministerial talks on the future of European defence were lately held in Warsaw. And though Emmanuel Macron has lately started making bold statements about deploying Nato forces to Ukraine, he was only following Poland’s lead.

To put it differently, then, only the Eastern Europeans have concrete incentives to take Trump’s security threats seriously: and only Poland has the wealth and expertise to actually drag its neighbours towards an independent defence policy. And, in a sense, that’s wholly appropriate. For while Western observers are more familiar with Poland’s years of subjugation — first by Prussia and the Tsar, later by Hitler and the Soviets — there was once a time that the country dominated the continent. In 1683, it was chiefly through the intervention of King Jan III Sobieski that Catholic armies defeated the invading Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna. Pope Innocent XI swiftly proclaimed Sobieski the “saviour of Western civilisation” for the timely arrival of the famed winged hussars. Around the same time, Polish kings, ruling over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, flanked the Baltic and Black Seas, and dominated Central and Eastern European affairs all while maintaining an inventive (if imperfect) system of elective monarchy. 

Over subsequent centuries, Polish leaders like Marshal Józef Piłsudski have occasionally tried to reclaim this illustrious mantle, seeing Poland not as a European hegemon, but rather as a power counterweight to both Russian and German expansionism. It goes without saying, of course, that the sober liberals of the Civic Platform don’t see themselves as Sobieskis reborn. Yet with Trump taking a hammer to the foundations of the European security order, the pendulum of history does seem to be swinging back towards a Polish military renaissance. 

It surely helps that since the end of the Cold War, Poland has worked hard to build up its forces. Quite aside from the headline GDP numbers, that’s clear enough elsewhere too. The country has emerged as the largest tank power in Europe, and boasts the third-largest fleet of F-16 jets on the continent. That’s shadowed by a recent shipment of F-35s from the US, with Poland receiving a custom model of the plane from Lockheed Martin. The new batch, for its part, is aptly named “Husarz” — a nod to the winged hussars of old. At the same time, Poland’s military leadership recently announced plans to develop an AI centre to support decision-making. Not to be outdone, Warsaw also said it was acquiring 486 HIMARS launchers: a ridiculous number, if undoubtedly a statement of intent. 

No less important, Poland has geographical reasons to take defence seriously. The only Nato member to share borders with both Ukraine and Russia, Poles have learnt by hard experience that their location on the North European Plain is painfully exposed. Since Trump’s election, though, officials in Warsaw have eagerly underlined that, whatever the political priorities in Washington, they remain unconcerned about America’s commitment to Poland in particular or Nato in general. 

We shouldn’t imagine that Poland can become entirely self-sufficient here, at least not for the moment anyway. It surely speaks volumes that Poland’s president recently felt the need to remind the world, and presumably Trump himself, of the importance of the American alliance. The fact he did so on Poland’s independence day is even more revealing. 

But nor should Andrzej Duda worry too much: despite his tough talk, Trump will find it almost impossible to escape Europe entirely. With the landmark opening of the first permanent US base in Poland last week, as part of a broader pan-European missile defence shield, America will necessarily continue to play some role in the region. Ever the businessman, Trump is also likely to see Eastern Europe as an enticing customer for America’s military-industrial complex. Earlier this year, the US granted loans to Poland and Romania, totalling $2 billion and $920 million respectively, all to buy American weapons. Except similar deals over the years ahead — especially if Trump is confident Nebraska farm boys won’t need to be deployed to help use them. 

Indeed, the President-elect’s essential self-interest could yet prove a boon to Eastern Europe. That’s doubtless true if Trump reduces the American troop presence enough to satisfy his domestic base — but nonetheless retains the country’s existing military infrastructure. That, in turn, could offer countries like Poland the best of both worlds: the Americans would provide essential support, in line with their own interests, even as Warsaw develops a more independent defence policy, one that ultimately goes beyond the strictures imposed by Washington. 

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In practice, this means Warsaw could finally execute major defence initiatives previously held in check by the Biden administration. One good example here is shooting down incoming Russian missiles and drones over Ukrainian airspace. As I wrote back in September, Russian projectiles have crossed into Polish, Romanian, and Latvian airspace several times since 2022, occasionally landing hundreds of kilometres inside Nato territory. Not only does this pose a threat to civilians, it also raises the risk of an Article V declaration against Russia. Certainly Mark Rutte, Nato’s new secretary general, seems to understand that where Poland goes, he’ll eventually need to travel too.

Nor is a decline in American interest merely a chance for Warsaw to flex its military muscles. On the contrary, Poland has also shown striking independence on migration policy as well. Warsaw has long viewed the influx of migrants along its border with Belarus — arguably history’s first man-made migration crisis — as indistinguishable from the security threats it faces from Russian hybrid operations in its territory and the errant Russian missiles lobbed from Ukraine. Much to the chagrin of NGOs, and despite some initial pushback, Europe has now mostly accepted the Polish narrative. 

Combined with Eastern Europe’s rising military might, and the region is clearly moving away from its traditional role as a pale imitator of Paris or Berlin. On the contrary, Warsaw and Bucharest could yet become the cities where the continent’s policy is devised and executed. Once that Pandora’s Box is opened, moreover, it’ll be impossible to close — even after 2028. Whatever happens in four years, whoever enters the White House after Trump may yet find a Europe transformed, one where the future is decided less in stagnant Brussels, and more in a fearless and prosperous Warsaw.

To mobilise his base, Tusk has seemingly placed his bets on the reliable call to arms of national security. With Moscow’s escalating its hybrid war against Poland, he has seized on his country’s centuries-deep animosity towards Russia to bolster his own credentials while also raising doubts about PiS’s own loyalties — mirroring very closely the ways that PiS had itself vilified him during last year’s election season.

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote about PiS’s committee to combat Russian influence, deriding it as an obvious political ploy meant to disparage Tusk as a Russian agent. Surreally, Tusk has now resurrected this committee for a very similar purpose, aiming its barrel at PiS and its political allies ahead of this weekend’s elections. His government has taken other pages from PiS’s national security playbook too — late last month, Poland re-established a border exclusion zone along its border with Russia-aligned Belarus that PiS originally put in place in 2021 and 2022.

The overt reasons for this are not hard to glean. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Belarus has continued, at Russia’s behest, to manufacture a migrant crisis at the border, while Russian agents continue to spread disinformation in Poland by, for instance, hacking into its state press service. According to European intelligence agencies, Russia is embarking on a campaign of increasingly more violent acts of sabotage across the continent, and Poland is likely to be in its crosshairs.

But just like PiS utilised this set of circumstances to go after Tusk, so too is Poland’s new prime minister unduly leveraging the Russian threat for political gain today. Fuelled by intense ideological rifts on everything from abortion rights to rule-of-law issues and the authority of the EU, Poland’s ever-expanding conflict between its two dominant partisan camps has inevitably begun to seep into its military and national security architecture — presenting a cautionary tale of political polarisation’s ability to undermine a country’s ability to respond to a potentially existential adversary.

The Russian influence committee Tusk has put in place, which officially started work on Wednesday, has important differences from PiS’s equivalent. It will, according to Tusk, not be an “investigative” body, and rather than sanctioning individuals outright, it will present potential cases of interest to the state prosecutor’s office.

Yet according to Bartłomiej Kucharski, an analyst at the publication Wojsko i Technika, Tusk’s committee will likely be just as partisan as PiS’s version, as it will possess no ability on its own to conduct truly robust fact-finding investigations or to uncover conclusive evidence of wrongdoing. “Perhaps there are such cases of [Russian] influence [among PiS and other parties],” Kucharski told me. “However, this committee doesn’t have the ability to really substantiate this or to punish anyone for it. In reality, this is an attempt to mutually pelt each other with accusations in order to limit support for the other’s political rival.”

Tusk’s committee was created at least in part as a response to the defection of administrative judge Tomasz Szmydt to Belarus last month, where he requested asylum and claimed he had been persecuted in Poland. Since his flight from Poland, a warrant has been issued for Szmydt’s arrest due to his alleged participation in information operations on behalf of Belarus and Russia.

Szmydt’s actions triggered a wave of finger-pointing by Tusk — in comments last week, he suggested that Szmydt’s connections to Poland’s enemies raised red flags about the man who hired him, PiS-era Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro. Yet the individuals who have garnered the most scrutiny from Tusk’s government lately have been former PiS Minister of Defence Antoni Macierewicz and one of his trusted deputies, Colonel Krzysztof Gaj. When announcing his new committee against Russian influence, Tusk claimed a “noose of information” was tightening around Macierewicz, accusing him of “disarming” the Polish armed forces during his tenure and surrounding himself with people allegedly tied to Moscow, like Col. Gaj, an infamously anti-Ukrainian military leader.

Investigators reportedly conducted a search of Gaj’s home last year, during which they found an extensive archive of military documents. However, no charges have been brought against him, and no investigation has been launched into Macierewicz’s alleged connections to Russia. Misconduct by such leaders is certainly possible — but experts believe Tusk’s increasing proclivity to suggest guilt by association in his campaign against Russian infiltration, often without any solid evidence, has the potential to rattle the rank-and-file of Poland’s military and security services.

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“I imagine that certain officers who were promoted by Macierewicz may feel uneasy,” Marek Świerczyński, head of the security desk at the Polish research institute Polityka Insight, told me. “It would be a risk to the system if some suspicions about Macierewicz were to be automatically applied onto the officers who were appointed by him.”

Such politicisation of Poland’s armed forces would undermine critical components of their cohesion, hampering their ability to function meritocratically at a time when Nato’s security hinges on it. Beyond such practical concerns, though, Tusk’s accusations and the resurrection of his committee present reputational risks for Poland’s security architecture as well. As Kucharski told me: “The very institution of the state becomes less reliable if a committee arises that is really for nothing, that does not have clear goals, doesn’t carry out real work, and could really be replaced by two or three paid publicists who would argue that those on the other side are Russian spies.”

In tandem with political mudslinging, Tusk’s government has utilised every possible opportunity to underscore its credentials as a bulwark against Russian infiltration, even in cases where none exists. After a fire destroyed a shopping centre in Warsaw last month, Tusk claimed the incident was “likely” connected to Russia and arrested several suspects in the case — even though, according to Kucharski, the event was more probably the result of arson related to localised mob-style score-settling. In an interview with the Polish press, a former Polish lieutenant colonel dismissed the Russia connection a conspiracy theory.

Of course, Russian acts of sabotage are indeed taking place in Poland, and pose a serious security threat to the country. But like his committee, Tusk’s politically motivated speculation undermines the real work of Polish counterintelligence services working to uncover Moscow’s influence in the country, cheapening legitimate charges of Kremlin infiltration in the process. Ask supporters of either Tusk’s ruling coalition or PiS, and you’ll find people in both camps who are convinced the other side is working for Russia. This reality is emblematic of Poland’s political divide today, and explains why encouraging such theories plays well with both sides’ core voting blocs. Already, Macierewicz has shot back at Tusk with claims of his own about the prime minister’s cooperation with Moscow.

The truth, however, is that, regardless of the reality of Russian influence in Polish politics, its wholesale politicisation has only served to benefit Moscow, whose core aim in its operations against Europe is to foment doubt, discord and intransigence among its rivals. A polarised Poland where matters of national security are treated as mere tools to garner votes ultimately favours none of Poland’s actors. Generating anti-Russian headlines may help Tusk win a few more seats this weekend — but at what cost?

For the best part of a year, farmers and truckers in Poland have been staging roadblocks, marches, and blockades along the Polish-Ukrainian border in protest at various Polish and EU measures which enabled an influx of Ukrainian grain into the country, undercutting the domestic supply. Although the protests were concerned with the economic impact on farmers’ livelihoods, a nativist note could often be detected — and Ukrainians certainly read them that way. On one occasion, in a post on X, Zelensky suggested that Poles were playing into Russia’s hands by effectively weakening Ukraine on the grain issue, prompting a harsh rebuke from Polish President Andrzej Duda.

Since the start of this year, the Polish state, the mainstream Polish media, and farmers’ unions themselves have strenuously condemned anti-Ukrainian protest messages like those in Warsaw. But the mere presence of such slogans has marked a sharp departure for a country whose entire society had once come together to welcome Ukrainian refugees with open arms. And beyond angry farmers, something has changed here at the diplomatic level too, a turn away from the effusive solidarity of 2022, back towards a relationship defined by realpolitik and coloured by some of the darkest horrors of the 20th century.

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On Monday, after months of negotiations and a sizeable subsidy from the Polish government for the agricultural sector, farmers finally suspended their blockade of the border. But the damage has already been done. A new survey released in late April showed that positive views of Poland among Ukrainians had fallen from a high of 94% in early 2023 to only 58% last month. Poles’ views of Ukrainian refugees have also grown somewhat more negative — although more recent figures are difficult to come by, in 2023, support among Poles for accepting Ukrainian refugees fell by 10% overall to 73%, and among some demographics such as young Polish women, to a mere 47%. And according to one 2023 survey, the percentage of Poles who wished to generally support Ukraine in its war effort dropped from 83% in early 2022 to 65% in 2023.

This growing fatigue was entirely predictable. Though few realised it at the time, that point in early 2022, when everyday Poles across the country quite literally opened their homes to families fleeing the invasion, was probably a once-in-a-lifetime moment of cross-border solidarity. For a brief period, the difficult minutiae of politics and history that had previously defined relations between Poland and Ukraine gave way to a national embrace, not just between two states, but between two peoples. Over two years since the start of the Russian invasion, and much to Vladimir Putin’s chagrin, Poland and Ukraine have remained allies. But the unbridled love affair between them and their people has ended, and the realism that had characterised their relations before 2022 has made a decisive return.

This is most clearly reflected in the two-pronged approach of Donald Tusk’s government, which seeks to maintain close ties with Ukraine on the security front while pursuing a more assertive, protectionist policy in the trade and agricultural spheres. Last week, in a policy speech to Parliament, Tusk’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Radosław Sikorski, reiterated Poland’s interest in defending Ukraine from Russia. But he consciously framed this commitment in terms that differed markedly from the overtures of brotherhood President Duda had used during the first year of Russia’s invasion. “It is in Poland’s obvious interest to keep the aggressor away from our borders, which is why sovereign Ukraine must win this war,” Sikorski said. “Thanks to the sacrifice of Ukrainians, we can move the borders of the free world hundreds of kilometres to the east.”

Though the support remains, self-preservation has now edged out altruistic solidarity. And the latest drama playing out  demonstrates this new reality perfectly: last week, Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz stated that Poland is ready to help return fighting-age Ukrainian men return to their home country for potential military conscription. Ukraine announced the same day that it would stop issuing passports to men of conscription age living outside of their territory, prompting a surge of anger among Ukrainians at their consulates in Poland.

This anger may soon come to be levelled at the Polish state itself since politicians are reviewing new rules this week that may cut social benefits for Ukrainians who cannot produce valid passports. Not only that, but Kosiniak-Kamysz has also refused to rule out deporting the men back to Ukraine at Kyiv’s request — a move which would sour relations even further. Helping Ukraine beef up its military manpower along the frontlines is clearly in Poland’s national interest — but gone are the days when Poland would agree to host any and all Ukrainians, no questions asked. If keeping the Russian enemy at arm’s length now requires some coercion of refugees, Poland appears ready to play ball.

In the long relationship between Poland and Ukraine, this is nothing new. In 1919, the founding father of the modern Polish state, Józef Piłsudski, coined an adage: “Without an independent Ukraine, there cannot be an independent Poland.” This has since remained the cornerstone of Polish policy toward Ukraine — but this didn’t always mean Poland was friendly toward Ukrainians if it didn’t suit its interests. In 1920, for instance, Piłsudski signed an alliance with Ukrainian independence leader Symon Petliura, and helped him to militarily re-establish control over Kyiv from Russian Bolshevik forces for a brief period. But just a few years before, during the last days of the First World War, Polish forces had waged a bitter ethnic war in western Ukraine, with Piłsudski himself capturing lands Ukrainians claimed as their own.

Ukraine’s leaders have approached the relationship in an equally transactional manner when it suited them, with exceptionally bloody consequences. During the Second World War, when an opportunity arose for the radical Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) to finally carve out a Ukrainian state on Polish territory, they did so with the utmost brutality. Between 1943 and 1945, the UPA carried out massacres of up to 100,000 Poles in today’s western Ukraine, what is known in Poland as the Volhynia Slaughter. Partially in response, the post-war Polish government carried out the resettlement programme known as Operation Vistula in 1947, deporting almost 150,000 Ukrainians from Poland’s south-east to new territories in the west.

At the conclusion of the Cold War, when both countries regained full independence from Soviet domination, Poland and Ukraine renounced all territorial claims against each other, and committed to living alongside each other as “equal and close peoples”. Comparatively cordial relations have existed between them ever since — during Russia’s shadow war in the Donbas after 2014, Poland supported Ukraine diplomatically, denouncing Russia’s annexation of Crimea. But the legacy of their shared history continued to loom, and, since 2015, disagreements over the exhumations of Polish victims of these wartime massacres and Ukraine’s memorialisation of radical groups like UPA threatened to reopen old wounds.

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Since 2022, when the hard reality of Russian aggression united Poles and Ukrainians once again, Moscow has tried to exploit this to pit Poland and Ukraine against each other, but without much success. Instead, it is economic issues that have threatened to drive a wedge between the two countries — and the grain dispute is just the start. Ukraine and Poland’s economies are joined at the hip, and Ukrainian immigrants have formed a crucial part of Poland’s labour market for years. In this sense, both countries are co-dependent, and the influx of Ukrainians since 2022 has ultimately been beneficial for Poland, despite fears among Poles about the strain Ukrainian refugees are having on their social service systems.

However, trade issues, of which grain and food imports are only a small part, may become a much bigger problem. Although Poland has so far been supportive of Ukraine’s entry into the EU, the lower cost of Ukrainian agricultural and consumer goods means that their incorporation into the single market could have a dramatic impact on Poland’s economy. In addition, Ukraine, rather than Poland and other current eastern EU states, would become the primary recipient of funds from Brussels as the bloc’s poorest member, stymying Poland’s growth trajectory. Paradoxically, overcoming these very contemporary material problems may be more difficult for the two countries than coming to terms with the ghosts of their past.

But these material problems are a consequence of the same reality: geopolitical proximity and the cold logic of survival. These two forces have brought Poles and Ukrainians together in anger and in friendship through the centuries, the latter usually whenever the resurgent Russian bear starts breathing down both of their necks. As long as that threat remains, Poland and Ukraine will have many reasons to co-operate. As for any long-time neighbours in Europe, the past is full of messy indignities. And even though the most idyllic honeymoon must eventually come to an end, there is no reason why an unvarnished, imperfect, yet honest and fruitful marriage can’t replace it.

In many ways, they’re right. In any tangible, geographic sense, Eastern Europe does not exist as a single entity and never has done. And thanks to the expansive, if uneven, impact of European integration since the early 2000s, nations from the former Soviet bloc are becoming less and less outwardly distinguishable from their Western neighbours. But still, I’ve always had a sense that something changes when one moves east across the Oder and Danube Rivers, though it’s not something that’s immediately apparent.

The feeling has grown sharper since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, as eastern European nations have increasingly operated as a united bloc. Last week, a row over Ukrainian grain erupted, as Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria simultaneously imposed import bans to the dismay of Brussels. The week before, several eastern European leaders and diplomats, including Poland’s prime minister, directly challenged French President Emmanuel Macron’s suggestion that Europe should abandon its close ties with the United States.

But the region’s bonds run deeper than politics, which is why reflexive reactions against the term “Eastern Europe” are ultimately short-sighted. As a Pole, I am almost certainly in the minority in thinking that there is something deep within the collective memory of Eastern Europe that colours our understanding of the world, making it radically distinct from that of Western Europeans. With only a few outliers, eastern European nations have stood up to Russia and supported Ukraine’s war effort with great vigour. There’s a reason for this: it’s because we understand exactly what it’s like to be where Ukraine is today.

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As I see it, “Eastern Europe” is a historical experience — one that stems from the indignity of domination by foreign powers, sacrifices made to win national freedoms and personal liberties, and the traumatic legacies of ethnic conflicts that remind us that we remain beholden even now to the brutal vagaries of human history. Perhaps the most fundamental building block in the Eastern European edifice, forged in the fires of centuries of subjugation, is the sense that resistance in the face of foreign oppression is worthwhile even if failure seems all but guaranteed. This idea has long shaped Eastern Europeans’ views of much of their past. National myth-makers in Serbia, for instance, have interpreted events as far back as the 1389 Battle of Kosovo — in which Serbian defenders valiantly wore down Ottoman invaders but were unable to stop the Turks’ eventual conquest of their lands — through the lens of noble struggle.

For the same reason, the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against Nazi German occupiers during the Second World War has become a cornerstone of modern Polish nationalism, even though it ultimately failed to liberate the country’s capital. And in February of last year, despite near-universal predictions that Kyiv would fall to the overwhelming might of the Russian military in a matter of days, Ukrainians chose to stand and fight anyway. This act of renegade heroism may be difficult for someone to fully grasp if they aren’t from Eastern Europe.

Largely because of the post-war Soviet sphere of influence over the region, Eastern Europe has long been identified with Russia. However, the term “Eastern Europe” has constantly been redefined throughout the ages, and there is no reason why its negative association with a bygone era should stop us doing so again. In reclaiming “Eastern Europe” for the 21st century, we must conclusively divorce it from Moscow, whose cultural, linguistic, and political ties to Eastern Europe have long masked its distinct and often hostile relationship to the region. The invasion of Ukraine is as good an excuse as any to cast off this veil once and for all.

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By Michal Kranz

As early as the Middle Ages, a delineation between East and West on the European continent existed in the form of medieval religious spheres of influence. The schism between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy created the first iteration of the idea of Eastern Europe, although its western boundary lay much further to the east than it does today, and its territory extended from Russia all the way down to Greece and Asia Minor.

By the 18th century, Moscow had transformed from an equal player in Eastern Europe to one of its overlords. Russia, alongside Prussia, the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Ottoman Empire, dominated the Eastern Europe we know today, and if one looks at a map of Europe in the year 1800, not a single country that exists today between the Oder and the Don Rivers was spared from imperial hegemony.

Around that time, Western European Enlightenment ideologues redefined “Eastern Europe” to suit their own ends and began to conceive of eastern territories as backward, unenlightened places. Western travellers to the region sent unflattering reports home: upon stepping into Poland, Marquis Louis-Philippe de Ségur, the French ambassador to Russia in the 1780s, said he felt like he had “moved back ten centuries”. Russia, despite being a great imperial power that had made a concerted effort to import French fashion, art, and culture, was not spared similar mockery.

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Whereas the Enlightenment looked down upon Eastern Europe, the Romantic Movement that followed cultivated anti-imperial nationalisms across the region, which in turn fuelled several uprisings in Poland, the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, and the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. These revolts inaugurated a defining trope of popular struggle against powerful oppressors that would unite the Eastern European experience for years to come while notably excluding Russia, whose national narrative was complicated by its status as one of the very empires Eastern Europeans were fighting to shake off.

The victory of the Entente in the First World War catalysed the transformation of these national movements into states, largely due to US President Woodrow Wilson’s decisive role at Versailles. The regional response to this occasion was hardly unanimous — Hungary, which separated from Austria but lost territory in the process through the infamous 1920 Treaty of Trianon, felt short-changed after the war. But despite never stepping foot in the region, Wilson and his Fourteen Points decided its future for the next two decades, redefining Eastern Europe as a dynamic experiment in self-determination — at least on paper.

Wilson’s victory lap however was short-lived, as Eastern Europe’s brutal 20th century attests to. Almost immediately after the cessation of hostilities in 1918, aspiring independence efforts in Ukraine were squashed by the Bolsheviks. From the Baltics in the north to Romania and the Balkans in the south, Eastern European nations ripped up Wilson’s noble ideas and took up arms against each other. The Second World War not long afterwards once again exposed the region to the terrors of foreign occupation at the hands of either the Nazis, the Soviets, or the Italians, incentivising eastern Europeans to resist their oppressors with even greater ferocity than before. It was no mistake that Nazi Germany attacked Poland first — in addition to being home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, it was Hitler’s gateway to the savage, subhuman East he so wished to subjugate.

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Against this backdrop, genocide and ethnic cleansing reared its ugly head, most notably during the Holocaust, which was carried out primarily on Eastern European soil with varying degrees of complicity from local populations. Ukrainian UPA paramilitaries also waged ethnic cleansing campaigns against Poles during the war, as did Croat Ustaše forces against ethnic Serbs, and Serbian chetniks against Croats and Muslims. Decades later, genocide characterised the Yugoslav Wars of the Nineties and continues to this day to define Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine.

The Soviet-backed Cold War regimes established after the war came to define the idea of Eastern Europe we are most familiar with today. Yet, while the Iron Curtain’s scars remain visible across the region, the days when Communism could be considered synonymous with Eastern Europe are long gone, giving way instead to the economic dynamism and immense diversity that now shines through the former-Warsaw Pact veneer.

But the common historical threads that bind Eastern Europe’s countries and peoples can be appreciated without diminishing their distinct national characteristics, political orders, and cultures. A new definition of “Eastern Europe” is vital if we are to understand how this new epoch fits into our collective past. Yet it fulfils a function for Western Europeans too. Eastern Europe’s defiant attitudes can come across as stubborn and obstinate. But now that we have seen how the horrors of the past can consume the Continent once again, Eastern Europe’s wisdom and predilection for resistance could prove indispensable.

“For most Albanians, it has always been our dream to join the European Union,” says Etleva Demollari, director of a new museum, House of Leaves, housed in the building that was the ‘Sigurimi’ (secret police) headquarters during the Communist dictatorship. Her own yearning to be included in the European project began when she was growing up in 1980s Tirana. Her city had become the poorest capital in the world: Communism’s biggest economic failure and a reflection of self-defeating isolationism.

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Demollari used to watch Italian TV stations through a reception ‘inverter’ her family had acquired. She was convinced it was the closest she’d ever come to experiencing another country, another way of life. International travel remained illegal throughout the 1980s, a hallmark of Enver Hoxha’s unique dictatorship. Each mile of the Balkan nation’s borders was enforced with bulbous barbed wire.

“Hoxha,” Demollari tells me, “was paranoid that any Albanian who travelled abroad could be recruited as a foreign agent.” Even the revered missionary Mother Teresa – canonised as a saint in 2016 – was considered a security threat in her home country: the Catholic nun was barred from returning from India to visit sick relatives. Meanwhile, some 6,000 Albanians (from a population averaging just two million) were executed for attempting to emigrate or challenge the state. A further 70,000 were interned as political prisoners.

Free elections failed to arrive when Hoxha died in 1985; six years later, then a university student, Demollari was part of a movement that went on to topple a seven-metre-high bronze statue of Hoxha. “We chanted as one: ‘Ne duam që Shqipëria të jetë si pjesa tjetër e Evropës’ [We want Albania to be like the rest of Europe].”

Demollari’s museum conceals chilling insight into the methods of surveillance, interrogation, torture and faux justice employed in Albania from the 1940s – when some assert that the Nazi party’s Gestapo also had a base here – right up until 1991. “It’s for Albanians,” she says “but it’s for foreigners also; to show how Albania was, so they can understand better this part of our identity. The history of Albania is different to the rest of Europe: more harsh, more power [abuse], more isolated.”

The museum was conceived by Albania’s ministry of culture, part of a published mission to achieve cultural integration with Europe. It represents the ultimate soft power play for a government desperate to finally open concrete EU entry negotiations in July, after 10 years of sustained effort to Westernise through condemning past sins.

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A charm offensive has been building since 2006, when the government first accepted and passed a resolution from the European Council that the crimes of the nation’s Communist regime should be “held equivalent” to those of Nazism. Within three years, Albania had formerly applied for membership to the EU. But it took five years for the nation to be officially recognised as a candidate. Until 2014, EU leaders weren’t persuaded that Albania was committed to tackling a problem that the nation seems unable to shake: corruption.

The election of the current government in 2013 was persuasive. The Socialist Party made stern pledges to enact a zero-tolerance policy toward corruption. And six years on, the European Council has recommended fresh assessment of whether the Balkan outpost now recognises the democratic standards it expects of members. A verdict is due this month and formal accession talks are expected to commence in July.

But has Albania’s progress been significant enough? Last year, the US Department of State identified “rampant corruption” in the nation. And just this weekend, thousands of protestors turned out in Tirana, calling for Rama’s resignation – accusing the man who was supposed to save the country from corruption of perpetuating it. In response, the Albanian president, Ilir Meta, cancelled the local elections due to take place on 30 June. He stated that the current politic chaos did not provide “the necessary conditions for true, democratic, representative and all-inclusive elections.”

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The huge demonstrations that have been taking place in the capital for weeks now were born out of long-standing frustration about endemic corruption and cronyism in day-to-day living. These demonstrations began when grievances about the education system came to a head.

Some students are angry about classmates being able to buy better grades. Others fear missing out on jobs to rivals from richer families, who they say they will bribe their way into employment.

Sara Kureta, a 19-year-old philosophy undergraduate, believes the prospect of joining the European Union could help her country to become a truly meritocratic society.

“I don’t have much money and my parents don’t have rich friends so corruption could be damaging for me,” says Kureta. “My friend’s mother paid to get a job as a nurse, which is really scary because you shouldn’t be able to do a job like that if you aren’t qualified to do it.”

“To be in the EU you have to have some common values and for us that will be really positive progress… I see the potential progress in an ethical way, and not in an economic way.”

At the moment, it is not just an alliance of nationalist parties in the European Parliament that is against further expansion of any kind. Broader scepticism remains elsewhere.

Marsida Turku, a medical student who works in ‘BunkArt2’ – another museum commemorating the victims of the Albanian dictatorship – has experienced international hostility. “I’ve been to Italy, Germany and Greece,” she begins. “Many people in these countries think we are still ‘in’ Communism and some that we are in some kind of war.”

“I don’t know why there is this opinion all over the world,” Turku continues. “We are maybe not the most developed country in Europe, but we are trying.”

Plenty of Albanians feel their fate should not rest on validation from the EU. “Some of us think it is unnecessary,” says Turku. I am among them. If we want to do something for our country, we can do so even if we are not part of the Union.”

Which could be just as well. Accession talks are an infamously drawn-out process, and Albania’s image is damaged by every fresh corruption claim. The nation has largely transformed since the grim days of Hoxha. But this month, a decade after Albania’s first bid to join the EU, will it be deemed democratic enough?

As recently as 2012, Mitt Romney – when he was the Republican Presidential candidate – described Russia as America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” He was criticised and mocked at the time, though not so much since Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, Putin’s intervention in Syria and other demonstrations of Russian military and diplomatic muscle.

And then there’s the home front, where liberals in America and other western countries are worried, some would say paranoid, about Russian interference in the democratic process. The allegations and rumours surrounding Donald Trump and his relationship to the Russians are a particular cause for concern.

But consider this scenario: Trump leaves office and takes up a lucrative position with a majority Russian-owned company – and not just any company, but one responsible for an energy infrastructure project of great geopolitical significance. Can you imagine the reaction that would provoke?

Further reading

Russia and China get cosy over energy supplies

By Peter Franklin

Funnily enough, something very much like it has already happened – except not with a former American President, but a former German Chancellor, i.e. Angela Merkel’s immediate predecessor, Gerhard Schröder.

Not long after leaving office in 2005, Schröder was appointed to the board of Nord Stream AG (whose majority shareholder is Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled gas company). The company was formed to build and operate Nord Stream 1 – an underwater natural gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany across the Baltic Sea.

For reasons I’ll come on to, Nord Stream 1 was highly controversial, but that hasn’t stopped the development of a second pipeline across the Baltic, called Nord Stream 2.

A Bloomberg editorial explains why a number of countries; including America, are opposed to the new project:

“Due to be completed in 2019, the pipeline will double the amount of gas Russia transports directly to Germany across the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream 1, completed in 2011, supplies 55 billion cubic meters a year to Germany; the second pipeline would allow Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas company, to funnel an additional 55 billion cubic meters over the same route.”

This strengthens Russia at the expense of its immediate neighbours:

“This would deprive Ukraine of up to $2 billion a year in transit fees, roughly 1.5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. It would also make Ukraine more vulnerable to Russian gas cutoffs — which the Kremlin could use to exact territorial concessions from Kiev.

Gas that gets to western Europe from Russia also passes through countries such as Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, all NATO members. They, too, are at risk of being denied supplies and transit revenues once Nord Stream 2 comes online. Poland’s government has called the pipeline a ‘hybrid weapon’ created by Moscow to divide the EU and NATO.”

Even before Nord Stream, dependence on Russian gas was seen as a threat to Europe’s energy security. The worry was that Putin could ‘turn off the tap’ and plunge Europe into freezing darkness. Of course, it’s not that simple. For a start, a pipeline of gas from Russia to the EU is also (figuratively) a pipeline of money from the EU to Russia – Putin cannot cut off the gas without cutting off the cash.

But what if he threatened to cut off supply selectively – putting pressure on Russia’s immediate neighbours, while continuing to sell at top dollar to western Europe? Again it’s not that simple, because the existing network of overland gas pipelines go through eastern and central Europe to get to western markets. The same jugular veins serve both sides of the old Iron Curtain.

Nord Stream 1, however, changes this by providing a bypass. In cooperating to build it, Germany and Russia have shafted the countries that lie between them (not the first time that’s happened).

In proceeding with Nord Stream 2, Germany is literally doubling down on a policy that many of its friends regard as deeply selfish. The two Presidents Donald – Trump of America and Tusk of the European Council – are for once united in opposition. And yet Germany seems determined to press ahead.

Further reading

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By Peter Franklin

It’s another reason to challenge the notion of Germany as the responsible adult of international politics. Trumpish America, Brexity Britain and riotous France may be more obviously dysfunctional, but that’s no reason to overlook German irresponsibility.

A nation that makes such a weak military contribution to Europe’s defences really should not have undermined its energy security.

There are voices in Washington calling for sanctions on companies involved in the pipeline. The Bloomberg editorial urges a less confrontational approach:

“The U.S. can support European political parties and interest groups lobbying Merkel to abandon the project… It should urge the European Commission to examine whether the pipeline makes member states vulnerable to Russian aggression and undermines EU goals for energy diversification. And it should promote alternatives to Russian gas, including increased imports of liquefied natural gas from the U.S.”

The Trump administration should also abandon its hostility to the low carbon energy solutions that are the ultimate answer to the West’s dependency on fossil fuels.

Tackling climate change isn’t just about heading off an environmental threat whose worst effects may still be decades away; it also strengthens the security of the West right now.

According to Rene Pfister (in a must-read piece for Spiegel Online) a favourite subject is something that came to an end exactly 400 years ago – the Peace of Augsburg, which was signed in 1555.

“The treaty initiated a 60-year phase of peace between Protestants and Catholics after the bloody turmoil of the Reformation and it initially seemed as though people had finally come to their senses. But that image turned out to be a deceptive one. In 1618, a war began unlike any the Continent had ever seen before. By the time the inferno ended 30 years later, large parts of Germany had been depopulated and many cities left in ruins.”

The war that started in 1618 was the Thirty Years’ War – arguably the most devastating conflict in central Europe until the First World War.

But why would Merkel be so interested in it now?

“To Merkel, the Peace of Augsburg is much more than some distant historical date. Rather, it is a warning of just how thin the varnish covering civilization really is. Just as people in the late 16th century were erroneous in their belief that the Peace of Augsburg would be enduring, we could be just as mistaken today in the belief that the postwar order, with all its treaties and alliances, serves as a guarantee that the scourge of war will not return.”

The Holy Roman Empire of the 16th and 17th centuries is, in many ways, analogous to the Europe Union today. Indeed, the parallels may be rather too close for Merkel’s comfort.

Famously, the HRE was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Rather it was a patchwork of loosely confederated states centred on, but not limited to, modern-day Germany and Austria.

The states varied in size and power from territories not much bigger than a single town (or in, one case, a monastery) to Habsburg Austria at the other end of the scale. After the Reformation, they also varied in religious allegiance. The Peace of Augsburg was a compromise between the Catholic princes (above all the Habsburg emperor) and their Lutheran Protestant counterparts. The key principle of the Peace was Cuius regio, eius religio – ‘Whose realm, his religion’. In other words, the people of each state would be expected to follow the denominational preference of the ruler (freedom of religion not being for the peasants).

If one reverses the positions of north and south, Protestant and Catholic, the parallel between the HRE and the EU emerges.

Further reading

Italy versus the EU establishment: now who’s being irresponsible?

By Peter Franklin

The EU too is a patchwork of states – from the very small (such as Luxembourg, a remnant of the HRE) all the way up to the dominant power, Germany. And there’s also an ideological fault-line that runs between them – dividing the economically orthodox core of the Eurozone from the heterodox countries of the periphery. The EU can be seen as a compromise between these two halves (albeit one that leaves no doubt as where the imperial authority resides).

There were many reasons why the Peace of Augsburg broke down. One of them was that the compromise only covered Catholics and Lutherans. The established powers were, therefore, destabilised by the emergence of Calvinism as a disruptive third force – and driven to murderous fury by the even more radical Anabaptists.

In today’s EU, the third force is represented by countries such as Poland and Hungary – whose defiance of the liberal true faith is a constant source of vexation. And let’s not even mention the ultimate heresy of Brexit.

If the Thirty Years’ War can he blamed on one man, it is the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II, whose disdain for compromise with the Lutherans – let alone the more challenging heretics – turned conflict into all-out-war.

His solution to the tensions of the Empire was to impose the will of the strongest power – and its ideology – on the other states.

I wonder if Angela Merkel can think of anything like that in the EU today?

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As Gordon F Sander explains in an article for Politico, that impact can be extreme. His focus is on Latvia, a former Soviet Republic and current member of the European Union:

“…nearly a fifth of the nation has left to work in more affluent EU nations: The U.K., Ireland, Germany.

“In 2000, Latvia’s population stood at 2.38 million. At the start of this year, it was 1.95 million. No other country has had a more precipitous fall in population — 18.2 percent according to U.N. statistics. Only Latvia’s similarly fast-shriveling neighbor, Lithuania, with a 17.5 percent decrease, and Georgia, with a 17.2 percent drop, come close.”

As Sander points out, emigration compounds other demographic factors:

“…economic migration is not the only reason for the country’s declining population. The small Baltic republic’s comparatively low birth rate and high mortality rate are also contributing factors.”

A detailed map of population changes across Europe, shows rapid declines over large parts of eastern Europe, and marked gains across much of western Europe – yet another manifestation of the EU’s east-west inequality.

But does this matter? Indeed, isn’t it a good thing that people are free to move to where their labour attracts the highest reward? If the EU is viewed as a market (and the free movement of workers is one of the four freedoms of the European Single Market) then one can see the population shift from east to west as a great success.

However, if one views the EU as nations and communities, then there’s a point at which population loss becomes an existential threat:

“‘Latvia is already a country with low population density,’ said Otto Ozols, a prominent journalist and television commentator. ‘At this rate, in 50 years or so, Latvia may cease to be a nation.’

“‘It’s five minutes to midnight for us,’ he said.”

As always with migration, it’s worth looking at the fine detail. Even within a small country like Latvia, the changes are far from uniform. For instance, the population of Riga – the capital city – is now edging upwards. However, that means the losses are all the greater in other regions:

“The impact of Latvia’s population crisis is severest, and most evident, in its poorest region, Latgale, in the country’s southeast corner bordering Russia. The average monthly wage in Latvia is €670 a month. In Latgale, people generally earn about half that…”

“Blocks of empty buildings near the center of the regional capital Daugavpils give the city a sense of partial abandonment.”

So, an emptying EU nation right next to Russia… what could possibly go wrong?

At the moment, the EU authorities are putting the eastern member states under pressure to accept more migrants from outside the EU. Indeed, immigration might seem to be the obvious answer to a declining population. However, that is to take a very western perspective.

For a longer view, take a look at a historical atlas of Europe. Flipping through the centuries, one can see that the borders of western Europe are more stable than those of the east. In the west, a geography of islands, peninsulas and mountain ranges tends to define the nations. But as one goes further east, it’s rather more contestable – especially with Germany at one end of the pitch and Russia at the other.

None of that is any excuse for xenophobia; but to see population change through the lens of economics alone is shortsighted in the extreme.

The flag of the European Union features a circle of identical stars. Symbolically, it speaks of nations coming together as equals. In reality, the power relationships between the different member states are hugely unequal.

A more representative flag would have 28 stars not 12, and they would be of massively different sizes. Their colours would be different too, from the 24 carat gold of Luxembourg to the rusty iron of the poorest members.

The gaping income inequalities across the EU drive mass migration from south to north and east to west. What is less visible, however, is the extent to which some EU members literally own the economies of poorer EU members.

It was a point made last year in an article by Leonid Bershidsky for Bloomberg:

“In a recent paper, Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman bluntly call Eastern European nations ‘foreign-owned countries’… 

“‘The owners tend to come from EU countries (in particular from Germany),’ they write. ‘So in some sense it is not entirely different from the situation of peripheral regions that are being owned by more prosperous central regions in a large federal country.’ To Piketty and collaborators, this is a nuisance because it distorts inequality measurements: Much of a country’s wealth and income accrues to foreign shareholders who do not belong to the local top one percent, so the country looks more egalitarian than it actually is.”

Germany has an economically dominant position in eastern Europe because of massive inward investment. However, this isn’t nearly so welcome as it used to be. Writing for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Sebastian Dullien explores the issue from a Czech perspective:

“…there is deep anxiety about the fact that Czech wages are no longer showing much sign of catching up with the German [wage] level. While the 1990s and early 2000s saw a steady convergence, there has been no progress since 2007.

“The blame for this aborted convergence is laid squarely at the foot of foreign investors…”

When the most important private-sector employers are foreign-owned, it’s not surprising that foreigners are blamed for stagnant wages:

“The source of discontent is that by now, basically all of the financial sector and half of the manufacturing sector is foreign-owned. The multinationals set the prices for the intermediary products that Czech factories produce, and by setting these prices low, they suppress wages in Czech Republic while boosting their margins.

“One story which seems to be endlessly retold is that workers at the assembly lines at Volkswagen plants in the Czech Republic only earn a third of the wage of VW workers in Germany, even though the assembly lines run at the same speed at the ones in Wolfsburg.” 

To compound the resentment, there’s the sense that Germany is using its huge economic influence over its eastern neighbours to force them into political concessions. Here’s Leonid Bershidsky, again: 

“The Hungarian, Polish and Czech governments can resist European directives on refugee resettlement and posture defiantly when their efforts to take over the courts are challenged: ‘We will not be a colony,’ Orban and Polish ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski have told EU officials on separate occasions. That, however, won’t change their de facto status as economic colonies of the wealthier West, unless the populist governments move to expropriate the foreign companies – an unthinkable development.”

British Eurosceptics have long complained about the size of the UK’s net contribution to the EU budget. The counter-argument was that Germany makes an even bigger net contribution, and you don’t hear the Germans complain about having to help the much poorer nations of eastern Europe.

However, Germany has a vested interest in channeling EU funds to their economic dependencies. Not only do German exports to eastern Europe exceed those of the United Kingdom by a huge margin; German (and other continental) firms also own the ‘commanding heights’ of those economies.

Progressives are usually very interested in unequal economic relationships – whether between different classes, different ethnic groups, men and women, or between the developed and developing world. Yet when it comes to the European Union, the profoundly unequal relationship between west and east barely seems to register.