So far, so Polish. Yet beneath the surface, Mikstat is unlike any other town in the country, for it’s the only Polish municipality where foreign-born residents outnumber ethnic Poles. “It’s hard sometimes to see a Pole here,” says Kacper, a 22-year-old local loitering in Mikstat’s main square.

He’s exaggerating — foreigners only make up 53% of the area’s urban population of 3,461, according to the latest government statistics. But even this is unheard of in a country that has long had a reputation as one of the most ethnically homogeneous in Europe, and which for years has been idolized by foreign conservatives as one of the last bastions of pure, unspoiled European culture. Some Polish extremists go even further: though we still don’t know his motive, last week’s Kraków shooter was apparently fascinated by Anders Breivik.

For many residents of Mikstat, though, and despite some growing pains, their multicultural existence has become as familiar as the sound of the church bells on Sunday. “Right now, there are the most [foreigners], but they’ve been here for many years,” says Kacper’s friend Dawid, 23 and lanky, dressed in a black-and-white tracksuit. “We’re used to it.”

Immigrants are no longer rare in other parts of Poland either. According to new data, nearly 6% of Poland’s population, or 2.3 million people, were foreign-born at the end of 2025, and though an overwhelming 73% of those are unsurprisingly Ukrainian, a growing number are from Central Asia, the Caucasus, Latin America, and elsewhere. Immigrants today make up 15% of the population of Warsaw, and almost 20% of the southwestern city of Wrocław.

This shift has not gone unnoticed. Poland’s hard-Right has recently pivoted from warning about the potential dangers of mass migration to using places like Mikstat to argue against people already here — all while positioning itself as the kingmaker ahead of parliamentary elections next year. Little wonder, in the wake of the Paris riots last month, that even Poland’s centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk touted his own country’s virtues by comparison, boasting that his government had issued fewer foreign visas than his populist rivals PiS.

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Eastern Europe’s identity problem

By Michal Kranz

If its leaders race to reclaim Poland’s role as a defender of the Europe of old, decades-long economic growth continues to reshape the country’s social fabric beneath their feet, attracting refugees, political exiles, and workers as the domestic birth rate continues to lag. The result is a social milieu more diverse than at any point in living memory, and which will continue redefining what life and identity look like in Poland’s cities regardless of what the politicians claim. Yet rather than heralding some unfamiliar, globalist ideal, this new reality instead echoes an older, pre-modern reality — the melting pot that existed in the country before Nazi Germany and Soviet communism robbed Poland of its multiethnic complexity.

“When I first started living here, there was still this institution of ‘the newcomer’,” says Witold Ślęzak, who heads Mikstat’s house of culture. Bundled up for the chilly November weather, Ślęzak speaks with an authority that belies his meager height.  “A newcomer was a resident of a worse category: he was a Pole, but not from Mikstat.”

If even fellow Poles from other nearby towns were once scorned in Mikstat, it’s not hard to imagine early contact with folks from beyond the frontier. Ślęzak recalls that when the first foreigners arrived in the town, initially from Ukraine as workers before the start of the war, local youths worked hard to get into fights with them. But as both sides grew accustomed to one another, things began to change. “We learned to live next to each other, so to speak,” says Ślęzak, his demeanor friendly but his face deadly serious. “I don’t have any problem with them. We live side by side and somehow we function together.”

If this initial tolerance likely emerged due to the relative similarities between Poles and Ukrainians — Christians, Slavs, lovers of vodka and borscht — the people of Mikstat eventually extended an olive branch to other new arrivals. After the Ukrainians came Moldovans, then Nepalis, and soon dozens more nationalities, most drawn by work at Mikstat’s large meat-processing plant. Today, according to the town’s former mayor, as many as 28 nationalities reside here, hailing everywhere from Indonesia to Georgia to Tajikistan.

John Gómez, a 29-year-old Venezuelan who started working at the factory after arriving in Poland two years ago, praises Mikstat’s quiet, understated atmosphere. “It’s a very peaceful place, as long as there’s work and stability,” Gómez tells UnHerd after he gets off his shift, his blue work lanyard still drooped around his neck. “I’ve liked the lifestyle here.” In front of the company shop at the edge of the factory, other young Latino men mill about as reggaeton floats out of departing cars.

Gómez’s journey to Poland was unconventional. After leaving Venezuela, he made his way through Colombia and Panama’s infamous Darién Gap in the hope of reaching the US. But unable to enter legally, he received a work contract in Poland through an agency. He wasn’t alone — despite its fierce opposition to illegal migration, bringing foreign workers to Poland was a consistent policy of the populist Right-wing PiS government before Tusk’s coalition took power in 2023. Under the party’s leadership, Poland led the EU in the number of new residence permits issued from 2016 to 2022. The impact on Poland’s labor sector was enormous, and by the end of 2025, foreigners made up nearly 7% of the entire workforce.

Even as Tusk’s latest government has suspended the right to asylum, and upped deportations by 320% since 2022, Polish institutions have continued to quietly endorse immigrant workers as a solution to the country’s demographic challenges. In 2023, the state Social Insurance Institution claimed that, in order to maintain its current ratio of workers to retirees, Poland would need to attract another two million foreign laborers over the next decade. That’s obviously fantastical — but what’s clear from cases like Gómez’s is that importing cheap labor isn’t just about economic demand, but also about keeping labor costs low for places like the Mikstat factory. If every developed market economy needs its underclass, then Poland can’t merely rely on richer immigrants from Ukraine or Belarus to fill the gap. Grist to the neoliberal mill, workers from the global south have therefore become a hot commodity.

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The battle for Poland isn’t over

By Michal Kranz

This tug-of-war between appealing nationalistic rhetoric and the hard realities of Poland’s economic hierarchy sits at the heart of contemporary national life. In cities like Warsaw, the service-worker class has become dominated not just by Ukrainian baristas, but also by Uzbek Uber drivers, African food delivery couriers, and Southeast Asian waiters, while interacting with immigrants has become an ever-present fixture of daily life regardless of national conversations around protecting Polishness.

In the Muranów district of Warsaw, just north of the city center and in the heart of the former Jewish Ghetto, Turkish kebab shops, Georgian bakeries, African wellness stores and other ethnic businesses crowd both sides of a long city block along John Paul II Avenue. Iconic red-and-yellow Warsaw trams rumble past groups of off-duty delivery couriers smoking cigarettes, while throngs of Ukrainian Gen Zs look on. Above them all, an enormous Polish flag billows in the distance.

“When I moved here, I saw the block buildings, the Slavic culture, and the cold weather, and people also have a bit of a different vibe,” says Mel, a 27-year-old Vietnamese barista who works at a coffee shop along the strip. “But the longer I live here, the more I feel like I’m immersed in the culture. I started to like it.” Mel adds that they’ve actually faced less open xenophobia in Poland than in the Netherlands — perhaps a function of unfamiliarity with immigrants in general — but that national politics has lately begun to carry an air of danger.

The largest nationalist protest in Poland is organized annually on 11 November, the country’s Independence Day. With political tensions sky-high and a Polish Right that feels more besieged than ever, today’s march could well be volatile. Yet even before this month’s upheavals, the far-Right had already taken their fight to Mikstat, seeing it as the perfect venue to make its nativist appeal. In October, the All-Poland Youth, an ultranationalist organization whose past leaders have gone on to form major Right-wing political parties, recorded a video of several of its members unveiling a banner in Mikstat’s central square, putting up posters throughout the town detailing the negative impacts of mass migration on everything from crime to wages. Both the All-Poland Youth and the protestors in the video declined to comment when contacted by UnHerd.

Locals like Ślęzak are appalled by this show of force. “Why don’t they bugger off and mind their own business,” he says of the All-Poland Youth. “If these people don’t bother them, aren’t aggressive, then why is it so bad that they live next to us, or even better, with us together?” Rather than push foreigners away, many Polish residents of Mikstat have made efforts to incorporate the town’s immigrants into its collective social life, welcoming them into public festivals and holding football tournaments with teams composed of players from different countries.

Contrary to popular belief in parts of Western Europe, and in stark contrast to claims by Joe Rogan that Poles merely want their nation to be “white”, integrating non-Poles into the broader sociopolitical fabric is a national tradition — albeit one largely forgotten since 1945. Starting with reforms in the 14th century, which allowed Jews to settle in Poland as “people of the king”, Poland became one of Europe’s most multicultural states, especially following its union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1569. The resulting Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth encompassed myriad ethnic and religious communities, including Ukrainians, Cossacks, Belarusians, Armenians, Jews, Germans, and even Muslim Lipka Tatars, giving rise to the idea of a “republic of many nations”.

After the resurrection of the Polish Republic following the First World War, the country’s preeminent strong man, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, tried to revive this idea through a model of civic nationalism that allowed minorities to maintain their own identity, language, and heritage — so long as they pledged unwavering fealty to Warsaw. A noble effort though it was, it was an imperfect one. Belarusians and Ukrainians in the republic’s eastern lands were the subjects of on-off forced Polonization, and despite Piłsudski’s good personal rapport with Polish Jews, antisemitism festered in the lead-up to the Holocaust, especially after the marshal’s death in 1935. What followed — invasion, genocide, population transfers, and Stalinist enthusiasm for the erasure of history — ended Poland’s multiethnic dream. And if memory of the “republic of many nations” certainly still exists, today’s migration politics is a form of resistance against exactly that dream.

To that extent, the dissonance between the country’s robust monoethnic identity and the increasing pluralism on the ground is an expression of national evolution in suspension. Of course, the centuries-old communities that comprised the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth differ drastically from the newer, more transient “newcomers” that challenge Polishness today. But like the foreigners conscripted to fill gaps on the Mikstat production line, many of the Commonwealth’s minorities also first arrived as itinerant travelers before settling down more permanently. The Lipka Tatars, for their part, were hired to serve in cavalry units in the royal army before being given land to settle.

Though many guest workers in Poland certainly don’t intend to remain here long-term, other foreigners clearly do. Despite the fantasies of certain Right-wingers, many Ukrainian refugees in Poland will remain even after the war ends, while others, especially the Vietnamese, are ready and eager to welcome their compatriots.

That’s exactly what happened to Mel, who was drawn to Poland by the relatively low cost of living and the opportunity to get a psychology degree in Warsaw, but who could then rely on work opportunities in a Vietnamese community that can trace its roots back to communist times. Now boasting Polish friends, and with a growing love for Polish food, Mel’s circle includes a medley of individuals, of varying economic and cultural backgrounds, that contains shades, however slight, of Poland’s prewar pluralism.

Challenges surely remain. In Mikstat, Ślęzak admits that the immigrants who interact with their Polish neighbors are outnumbered by those who keep to themselves. Perhaps that’s unsurprising: after long shifts at the factory, few have time to do much beyond resting at home, socializing only with those most familiar to them. Other clashes are more explicit: the frequent Russian voices heard in the center of Warsaw remain grating to Polish ears no matter their views on their war, while Poles generally remain suspicious of immigrants from the Islamic world. According to Ślęzak, native-born residents of Mikstat complain about the “loud noise” that their foreign neighbors sometimes cause.

Still, newcomers like Gómez try their best. “It’s very different, but you gradually get used to it,” he says. “In my case, I’m adapting to your culture, because Polish people aren’t going to adapt to my culture, because I’m the immigrant. I’m the one who has come from outside.” That willingness to integrate is exactly what made it possible for minorities to feel a sense of common identity with their Polish Catholic neighbors in the 17th and 18th centuries. The trouble, though, is that for such an experience to arise again, Poles themselves must adapt too — and with the nativist ideal fired by the traumas of the 20th century, it’s unclear how many are willing. If fanatics like the Kraków shooter don’t succeed in bringing down the emerging multicultural Poland, the country’s own inertia may yet do it for them.

For the first few months, Rafał worked at a strawberry farm on eastern England’s great, flat plain. I assume this was tough labor, out in the sun and the wind and the rain, bent over in a field doing the work the English did not want to do at wages they would not accept. But Rafał, a compact 46-year-old with greying hair, is flippant. He did not find it difficult. It was an easy life. And besides, he was making money. Soon, he had new clothes, a new suit. “I had too much money,” he grins, holding his hands apart to indicate a thick wad of cash. In Poland, an hour’s work would get him two liters of fuel, but here he could buy eight or nine. Rafał had arrived in an East Anglian El Dorado. 

We are speaking on the pavement outside a Polish supermarket in one of Peterborough’s less salubrious districts, its streets tucked behind the train station. Almost 20 years ago, this was, the Daily Mail proclaimed, “the town the Poles took over”. “This has happened so quickly,” a pub landlord told the paper. “Two and a half years ago this was a lovely place to live. People would talk to each other in the street, shout good morning or visit each other for tea. Now the old people are scared to walk out at night.” It is clear, looking around, that the demographics of this corner of Peterborough have changed — and are changing again. I walk past an Eastern European shop advertising goods from Romania, Ukraine, and Lithuania, but it is closed and clearly has been for some time. Another European shop now advertises fresh dosas. Palestine flags flop from nearby windows. New cycles of migration are being fitted over the old, compounding like the layers of a Roman road. 

Observing the shift, Rafał’s attitude has begun to mirror that of the pub landlord two decades before. “Sometimes black people ask me for spare change,” he says. “I say ‘go and work’.” His girlfriend is often scared to walk to the shops on her own at night. But he is not bothered. He is not a conflict guy. Recently, though, Rafał has seen something more concerning via Polish language media. An 18-year-old British-Polish man, Henry Nowak, bleeding to death on a Southampton street, as he begs impassive officers for help. According to the latest census, 4% of Southampton is Polish. When protesters rallied following the conviction of Nowak’s killer, they were joined by members of the Polish community.

Video footage of the demonstration shot by AY Audits, an anti-migrant influencer, shows a group of ruddy Polish men in sports gear facing off against a line of police. One clutches a tin of beer in his hand. The Poles chant in their own language before the Englishmen around them begin shouting “wanker”, and then the two sets of voices merge. “The Poles are some people,” added a viewer on X later. “Give them a few cans of Tyskie and they’d go to war with us.”

Poles began moving to Britain in any real numbers during the Second World War. The arrivals were largely male and often keen to turn around and fight their occupiers. By 1951, Britain was hosting more than 160,000 Polish refugees; most wished they could return home. 

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Those that came from 2004 onwards were different. Like Rafał, they had been drawn by the promise of higher wages and the chance to escape a brutal post-communist transition. And while other European nations put restrictions in place to limit migration from Eastern Europe, No. 10 did not. In the decade to 2014, the number of Poles in Britain rose from 69,000 to around 853,000.

Ten years after Brexit, the Poles demonstrating in Southampton reveal how far Britain’s migration politics have shifted. Quizzed in 2015, Nigel Farage said that he preferred immigrants from India than Poland. It was wrong to have a system that discriminated in favor of Europeans, and against those from the subcontinent, he told LBC the year before. Appearing on BBC 3, a youthful Tommy Robinson claimed that all migration from Poland should be blocked. Buttonholed this year by a Polish YouTuber, he insisted the opposite. “I love the Polish immigrants,” he said. “I’m for them.”

Perhaps there was always an element of cynicism. It is harder for your opponents to accuse you of racism if you argue that white immigrants are a greater problem than non-whites. But anti-Polish, anti-Eastern European sentiment went far broader. Polish migrants, the press alleged, were pillaging swans and fish from the rivers. The “Polish baby boom” would, we were told, lead to schools and the NHS being overwhelmed. 

In 2015, Polish workers went on strike and gave blood to push back. George Byczynski, who organized the donation drive, told the press a compatriot in Kent had been subjected to an arson attack and graffiti telling him to “go home”. “There is an issue,” he said, “with the language politicians use and sometimes they do scapegoat Polish people.” After Brexit, though, bigotry truly exploded. “It was an extremely stressful time,” remembers Tomasz Wisniewski, a Worcester businessman and community activist. “I remember Polish shops being attacked, people on the street being attacked, children at school being attacked.” In one instance, a mother was beaten on her way home from picking up her kids. “I still have the pictures on my phone,” Wisniewski tells me. “You can see blood on their faces. I will never forget it.” 

For Wisniewski, the disregard for people who had spent years working in Britain was reminiscent of the way in which the Government had appeased Stalin by failing to invite Polish troops to a victory parade held after the Second World War. Many Poles, he says, made this comparison to him in 2016. He believes he only avoided discrimination himself because he always makes sure to wear a suit. As he puts it: “I noted that people respect other people in suits in the UK.” 

As Rafał’s Peterborough implies, the demographic mix of migrants to Britain has shifted once more. Free movement for Europeans ended; entry barriers for workers and students around the world were lowered. As a result, around 4.2 million people entered the country legally between 2021 and 2024. At the same time, tens of thousands began arriving yearly by small boat. 

The idea that the British state is practicing anti-white discrimination has meanwhile become central to Right-wing politics. Writing earlier this month on Substack, Nigel Farage argued that there is “nothing fair” about the way “White people” (his capital “W”) have been treated by successive governments. (Had he taken power in 2015, it might be noted, he would presumably have contributed to such discrimination by favoring Indian over Polish migrants.)

Acknowledging that the white British share of the population is due, in time, to become a minority, Farage appears to be positioning Reform UK as the white identity party for a balkanized nation. “Without a voice to speak up for [White Brits],” he concluded, “the future will be manifestly unjust.” The sight of Southampton’s Poles confronting the police alongside furious, anti-migrant Britons might therefore be read as a sign of their assimilation.

“So you had a Portuguese wave, you had a Lithuanian wave, you had a Polish wave and then you had Bulgarian wave and Romanian wave,” says Iga Paczkowska. “So now we are good foreigners. The other foreigners are bad, but we are good foreigners. ‘We don’t like foreigners, but we like Polish.’ This is something I heard so much, so many times.”

We are sitting in her office in the center of Boston, once the locus of Polish migration to the UK. When the 2011 census was taken, this rural, Lincolnshire town had the highest population of Eastern Europeans anywhere in the country. Workers had made a beeline for the place, taking jobs in agriculture and food production and transforming the area. In response, Boston registered the highest Brexit vote in Britain. Three quarters of residents voted to Leave. 

Paczkowska had thought it was impossible that Remain would not win. “For us, it was so ridiculous that it was unbelievable,” she says. Earlier in 2016, she had set up a business, Lincs-EU, that would help Polish migrants fill out paperwork and settle into Britain. A decade on, she is still busy, but far less than she would have been had we remained. Boston, which even for a provincial English town seems to have a high rate of shuttered shops, has declined since, she thinks. “It changed, here you are. But definitely not for the better.”

Like other British-Poles I speak to, Paczkowska is cynical about the attempt by some on the Right to defend Henry Nowak. Farage should be told about his preference for Indians over Poles, she says. “Let’s remind him that he doesn’t want to live next to Eastern Europeans.” 

The apparent co-option of Poles into a coalition against anti-white discrimination does not reassure her either. “I think that Farage is a great politician,” she says. “But this is the person who, in my opinion, is as stable as a gummy bear. Whatever way the wind is blowing he’s going to go. He’s just using Henry’s death for his agenda. He sees the opportunities to campaign and that’s what he does.”

Though she opposes Farage, Paczkowska is not uncritical of Britain’s immigration regime. A jump in Romanian migrants to Boston after Brexit has caused new social fissures, she says. “They are more loud, more noticeable. They are shouting, they are dancing. They are playing music on the street, they are playing bowl on the street, they are playing soccer.” 

Other British-Poles are paid up supporters of Reform UK, such as Adam Mitula, who served as the party’s interim campaign manager for the Gorton and Denton by-election until he was suspended over racist comments on social media. “Henry Nowak is half Polish. His dad is Polish. He could have been my son,” he wrote on Facebook after the trial of the teenager’s killer concluded. “I don’t want illegal immigrants in Europe,” Mitula added. “I don’t care. I don’t want foreign criminals in Europe. I don’t care.” 

Given that Poland has repeatedly elected governments opposed to mass migration and asylum, this is perhaps unsurprising. For many on the Right, the central European nation is an inspiration. Robinson, now all in favor of Polish migrants, has attended a Warsaw nationalist march. He counts Dominik Tarczyński — famous for his boast that Poland would not admit one illegal Muslim migrant — as a friend; the Law and Justice MEP would have spoken at the latest Unite The Kingdom protest had Sir Keir Starmer not banned him from Britain.

In many ways, we are a long way from 2016. Over the last decade, Poles have climbed the economic ladder. They are far less likely to work on a factory floor, far more likely to speak English, and many, like Nowak, are slipping into the native population, identifiable only by an unfamiliar surname. As Britain’s migration debate becomes more sharply racialized and as white identity politics rises, they may yet be assimilated further. 

When I ask Wisniewski if he now feels secure in Britain, he tells me it is still unclear. “What will happen in the future, it depends on the political mood,” he says. “If politicians say Polish people are taking our jobs and eating swans then we’re going to be in trouble again.”

Having fled her home in western Ukraine in the early days of Russia’s invasion, Iryna recalls the warm welcome received at first. Locals offered food, homes, and clothing to the more than 1.5 million refugees who poured over its border. “We were treated very kindly,” she says. Yet just in the last months, the mood has shifted alarmingly.

Iryna is far from alone in her anxieties. Several other women I met at a UNITERS Foundation center, a charity in the Polish capital offering support to Ukrainians, spoke of similar fears. One pensioner from war-torn Zaporizhzhia was even pepper-sprayed outside an optician’s. “Now I try not to speak Ukrainian on the streets. If there are gatherings of Poles, my son recommends I stay away and watch out for myself.”

Hostility is surging. The center’s windows have been smashed several times, and state funding has now been terminated. In Przemyśl, a rail hub by Ukraine’s border, the mayor removed the blue and yellow scarf from a big teddy bear in the Christmas market after an outcry. In the Baltic coast region, a school teacher called his Ukrainian teenager pupils “scum”, while other youngsters spat on and beat the refugees so badly that one was left with a broken nose. One pupil also reportedly played recordings of bombs falling on Ukraine while yelling “time to hide” at his victims.

Poland is far from unique in seeing rising resentment to refugees. But these are people fleeing a neighboring country riven by war, not some distant land with an alien culture. Moreover, Poland too is a country that suffered from Moscow’s repression for decades — it shares Ukraine’s loathing of Russia and helped lead Europe’s initial response to Vladimir Putin’s assault on Kyiv. But attitudes have changed and show how bitter political struggles over the future, often entwined with unresolved perceptions of the past, are erupting across the West. Sensitive historical fissures underlie this transformation, combining with an all too familiar catalog of modern issues — disinformation, migration, populism, security, technology and trade battles — to create a highly combustible political environment.

“This is not yet a catastrophe but it is a new challenge for us,” says Miroslaw Skorka, chairman of the Association of Ukrainians in Poland. “For Poland, the story about victory over the Ukrainians was very important for post-war communist identity. So even during that explosion of support in 2022, a part of the population stayed silent. Now there is a schizophrenia: we need Ukrainians in the labor force to work and help grow our economy, but immigrants get scapegoated in schools and on the streets.”

Living on our island nation, with borders that have been fixed for centuries, British people often forget the turbulence endured by those living in the regions that historian Timothy Snyder has called the “bloodlands” of central and eastern Europe. Thousands of ethnic Poles were murdered in the Second World War by nationalists seeking to create an independent Ukraine, then many Ukrainians were in turn killed in savage retaliatory violence. In 1947, after the communist takeover, about 140,000 Ukrainians — including Skorka’s family — were forcibly moved in Operation Vistula from their homes in south-eastern regions to western areas taken from Germany in order to break up their community and curb support for insurgents, resulting in much hardship.

This left lingering historical sores on both sides — and these have been inflamed by resurgent nationalism, divisive politicians and the Kremlin’s adroit abuse of social media to spread discord in democracies. The sharp decline in sympathy for Kyiv is highly significant in a country that spent years warning complacent politicians in the West about Moscow’s expansionism, and that moved rapidly to bulk up its own armed forces in response to Putin’s aggression. Recent surveys of Poles have indicated that the majority oppose their neighbor joining either Nato or the European Union, and almost half want to reduce military support.

According to Marta Prochwicz, deputy head of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Warsaw, the nation remains united over its core approach to Russia. “Poland is as anti-Russian as Ukraine — it’s practically impossible to find pro-Russian attitudes in Poland. At the start of the war, the public mood was very supportive. Because of the common threat, the automatic, knee-jerk reaction of the party in power was to give military equipment to Ukraine straight away.”

When Vladimir Putin attacked Kyiv, the ruling party of Poland was the conservative Law and Justice (PiS). It had governed since 2015 and presided over a period of controversial judicial reforms, an abortion ban and the harsh anti-LGBT rhetoric. Yet faced with a looming election and the strong threat from the rival liberal party, led by former EU president Donald Tusk, PiS tried to fire up voters with populist policies and stunts. They unsuccessfully demanded Second World War reparations from Germany, backed farmers protesting against cheap grain flooding the market under an EU deal designed to help Kyiv, and urged Zelensky to apologize for wartime massacres by nationalists 80 years earlier.

Despite Tusk’s party winning the subsequent election, the stirring up of those issues had lasting effects. Farmers protesting at the border, and the increased talk of exhuming graves of massacre victims, started to turn the mood against Ukrainians. Donald Trump’s return to the White House accelerated these changes.

This year’s bitter, hard-fought presidential contest also saw the unexpected victory of populist historian Karol Nawrocki, an independent backed by PiS. Nawrocki opposed Kyiv’s accession to the EU or Nato until “important civilizational issues” for Poland were resolved — referring to the wartime massacres by Ukrainian nationalists — while proposing to give Poles priority access to benefits, doctors and schools.

This has led to tussles with Tusk over extending support to refugees, although the prime minister — weakened by his party’s failure to win the presidency — has ruled out sending troops to back a ceasefire in Ukraine. Last month, Nawrocki agreed for “the last time” to extend legal status for Ukrainians until March, leaving their future uncertain. This is despite studies suggesting that more Ukrainians work in Poland than in any other European nation and that they generated 2.7% of the country’s GDP in the last year. Meanwhile, sabotage attacks and September’s drone incursion into Polish airspace rattled many citizens — especially after two Ukrainians linked to Russian intelligence were identified last month as suspects behind some rail blasts.

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The flood of people over the border highlights how Poland — with its fast-growing economy and rapid post-Soviet modernization — has transitioned from a nation of emigration to one that offers alluring prospects as well as sanctuary. After Russia’s invasion, the million Ukrainians who came to Poland, joining the 1.3 million already there, were typically from more middle-class backgrounds than the earlier waves of “invisible migrants” working in low-paid jobs in fields and factories. Yet as one screenwriter with three university degrees tells me, she decided it was better to return home and endure Putin’s bombs than to be repeatedly offered cleaning jobs. “It is not a problem to clean some toilets — but it is a problem if I have to do this for the rest of my life.”

Now a new influx of men aged between 18 and 22 is further fueling concerns, given reports that at least 100,000 men have reportedly left Ukraine after the ban on adult males going abroad was lifted in August. Among them is Roman Melnyk, 22, an English teacher from Kyiv I met at Warsaw station. “This is my first day abroad in my whole life,” he says, explaining that even his soldier father had urged him to leave their war-torn country. Yet these refugees have been less warmly received than predecessors. “We should not allow Ukrainians of military age into Poland,” was the response of the far-Right Confederation party. “Poland cannot continue to be a haven for thousands of men who should be defending their country, yet burden the Polish taxpayer with the cost of their own desertion.”

In contrast with the war’s early days — when the Polish president received a standing ovation in parliament for declaring that Ukrainians were not refugees but guests — polling now shows that opposition to accepting Ukrainian refugees is at its highest (at 45%) since responses started being recorded following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. And most Poles now believe too much assistance is being offered, saying benefits and health care should only be offered to refugees working and paying taxes.

Research has also shown that the words most associated with Ukrainians on social media are “demanding” and “cunning”. One analysis found that 94,000 anti-Ukrainian posts appeared on X in just over four months this year, often linking Ukrainians to sabotage attacks in Poland or anti-Polish atrocities in the Second World War. Pro-Russian accounts have also blamed Ukraine for the recent drone incursions. And these stories feed neatly into Russian disinformation narratives, which the army has described as a key part of Russia’s strategy of “cognitive warfare”.

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Putin’s disinformation tricks have undoubtedly intensified the political divisions and hostility toward refugees. During the presidential campaign, for instance, seven cities received fake emails supposedly from Ukrainian House, a leading cultural and support center, seeking consent for demonstrations in support of Nawrocki’s main rival. It emerged later they included a word left untranslated from Russian. “How can you be a Polish nationalist and repeat divisive narratives that obviously have their roots in the Kremlin?,” asked Ben Cope, the NGO’s director of programs.

Yet Olena Babakova, an academic, journalist and migration researcher who moved from Kyiv 17 years ago, believes it is wrong to overestimate the Kremlin influence. “I often attend meetings with Polish politicians and when I ask why relations are poor, they blame Russian propaganda. And it was the winning presidential candidate who said the Polish NHS should develop an algorithm to automatically move Ukrainians to the end of the line for doctors so Poles could be first. If that is not racist, what is?”

She argues that refugees get scapegoated for wider economic and political failures. These are all familiar issues being discussed from Washington and Westminster through to Warsaw. Yet toward the end of our conversation, Babakova unwittingly echoes the British-Hungarian writer Gitta Sereny, who wrote about the complicity of a similarly passive society that refused to confront uncomfortable truths in darkening times.

“I have friends who tell me they limit their public presence in cafes, supermarkets or on the street in order not to be insulted,” Babakova says. “It is not that all Poles are anti-Ukrainian but the voices of a hostile minority, perhaps about 20%, have become so loud while the majority stays silent. Ukrainians who tell me they have experienced hate speech and violence always say the biggest problem is not that they were assaulted — but that everyone around them was silent.”

It’s true that the two leaders do get on quite well on a personal level. Donald Tusk, Poland’s premier, is probably the most pro-German politician you can find in Poland. Meanwhile, there hasn’t been a more pro-Polish German chancellor in recent times than Friedrich Merz. The two are members of the same party in the European Parliament, and yet they both keep messing it up.

Tusk has a reputation for making serial misjudgments. In the UK, he is best known for his unhelpful interventions in the Brexit referendum while president of the European Council. Misunderstanding Britain’s internal political dynamics when making the case for Europe back in 2016, he ended up driving doubting Remain voters into the Brexit camp.

Last week, we had another one of those Tusk blunders — in the form of a tweet about Nord Stream 2, the Baltic Sea gas pipelines which were blown up by Ukrainian commandos in 2021. Responding to Germany’s request to extradite one of the men allegedly involved, Tusk wrote: “The problem with Nord Stream 2 is not that it was blown up. The problem is that it was built.”

In one respect he is right. Poland has long argued that the pipelines made Europe too dependent on Russian energy. Germany massively damaged Europe’s security interests by seeking private commercial deals with Russia back then, even after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea.

But to condone such violent destruction is an act of political madness. Imagine someone had said: “The problem is not that President X got assassinated. The problem is that he or she was elected in the first place.” You would presumably be appalled, regardless of your political position in respect to the president in question. Mercifully, nobody was killed when the explosions ended the gas supplies to Germany overnight. And luckily the sabotage didn’t leave Germany without power — it was a mild winter and the government did a good job managing the transition to new suppliers.

But the destruction was unequivocally a criminal act. The pipelines had been legally constructed and commissioned. They were private property. And we now know, thanks to the German prosecutor, that a group of operatives with links to the Ukrainian military and secret service are suspected of carrying out the sabotage. It was, without a doubt, the military operation of a state. From Tusk’s comment, then, you would think that Poland now officially condones an act of terrorism.

But Tusk wasn’t the first Polish politician to support the violent destruction of the pipelines. Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s current foreign minister, was an MEP at the time of the explosion, and he tweeted: “Thank you, USA”, in what turned out to be a mistaken reference to the US as the force behind the explosions. Given such comments, and given what we now know about the explosions, it is politically impossible for Germany to adopt pro-Polish positions.

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The Germans, though, are as much at fault when it comes to provoking its neighbor. Despite his emollient diplomacy towards Poland, Merz’s first political act after being elected chancellor in May was to erect border controls to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. Acting unilaterally, the premier ditched the rules of the Schengen passport-free travel zone by invoking emergency clauses over immigration, causing chaos in Poland. His reasons for doing so were barely credible, and some would say even risked breaking EU asylum law. After all, the last big wave of immigrants came from Ukraine in 2022, after Russia’s invasion. The numbers had stabilized. For now, Poland and Germany both have one million Ukrainian immigrants. But this is a far bigger load for Poland, which has only half the population, and a fifth of Germany’s economic output. To close the German-Polish border to stem the flow of immigrants constitutes a naked act of beggar-thy-neighbor politics.

But, then, this is the same mindset which caused Nord Stream to be built in the first place — it’s Merkel’s mindset. She and Gerhard Schröder both masterminded the deal and after leaving office, Schröder even became the head of the consortium that built it.

Merkel, meanwhile, might no longer be politically active, but she has reappeared on the scene to defend her record and stoke internal discord within the EU. In an interview with the Hungarian media company Partizán last week she inflamed the Poles by blaming them for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “In June 2021, I felt that the Minsk Agreement was no longer being taken seriously by Putin, and this is why I wanted a new format in which we, as the European Union, would speak directly with Putin,” she said. “This was not supported by some. These were mainly the Baltic states, but Poland was also against it.”

There were good reasons why Poland and the Baltic Republics did not support another Merkel-led diplomatic initiative. They saw it as another way for Germany to maintain its toxic relationship with Russia to the detriment of Eastern Europe. I thought at the time that Poland’s objections to Merkel’s suggestion were reasonable.

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But virtually all of Merkel’s later foreign policy initiatives were failures. She will go down in history both as one of the architects of the Russian-German political romance, and as a leader who failed to arrest Germany’s still ongoing economic decline. I criticized her often over her refusal to resolve the eurozone’s crisis for reasons of political expediency. I see this failure as the quintessential cause behind the EU’s political weakness today.

These growing fractures in key relationships binding the EU together will have an unavoidable and significant effect on national politics. The current investigation into the Nord Stream sabotage is a case in point. As Poland deliberates over Germany’s extradition request for Volodymyr Z, one of the suspected Ukrainian perpetrators, Tusk’s comments appeared to exonerate him. This has enormous potential for blowing up in the faces of the German and Polish leaders, and it plays straight into the hands of the AfD, which is currently outpolling Merz’s CDU/CSU. For the Right-wing nationalists, deeply critical of Ukraine, it is a story that will keep on giving. The German court trial will reveal a lot of unpleasant details of the operation. There will be a lot of emphasis on the links between the perpetrators and the powers that were behind it. I don’t for a moment believe the story that this was a privately funded operation. This trial could have a profound impact on German public opinion.

As things escalate, we will inevitably see the rise of bilateral tensions over Ukraine’s EU accession. Germany’s current coalition supports it, but on one condition: the EU budget has to be reformed first. Germany does not want to have to bankroll the reconstruction of Ukraine by itself. If the Germans get their way, this would invariably be at Poland’s expense. Right now, Poland is the biggest net recipient of the EU budget, and Germany the biggest net contributor.

For the EU to continue to function as a serious geopolitical force, then, a repair in the German-Polish relationship is a minimal requirement. But the way both sides are behaving at the moment suggests this is not going to happen. If they remain unresolved, though, these current political squabbles could prove explosive.

A repeat of 1939, this time between Nato and Russia, is far from imminent. But the battleground for their undeclared shadow conflict has now dramatically shifted westward to eastern Poland and the Baltic states — very likely to Ukraine’s detriment. While Ukraine remains Nato’s forward beachhead against Russian expansionism, the alliance’s eastern flank is now its frontline, and not only figuratively: Putin’s incursion was clearly a test of the alliance’s ability to respond to a breach of its frontiers, and an effort to determine the upper threshold of its tolerance for such actions.

Now that Nato has held Article IV consultations, and declared that the incident does not meet the formal definition of an “armed attack” under Article V, Moscow has established a new set of clear contours for what it can get away with. That, in turn, sets the stage for a new phase in the Nato-Russia shadow war, one where on-and-off, aerial confrontations between the West and Moscow are not only possible, but may well become the norm.

While Western leaders were quick to promise additional support for Ukraine following Putin’s drone wave — with no less than Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte himself entering the fray — frontline Nato states are likely to hunker down and protect their own territories, just as they’ve been signaling for the better part of a year.

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“We are absolutely unprepared for this conflict. Our contemporary military is not prepared for the war that is actively taking place beyond our eastern border, a war where right now millions of drones are now being produced yearly.” These are not the words of a pro-Ukraine Polish politician, like Prime Minister Donald Tusk, but rather an exasperated Sławomir Mentzen, the Right-wing, Ukraine-skeptic presidential candidate who came in third in June’s election, and who’s emerged as the country’s kingmaker.

Mentzen was speaking on national TV following the drone attack, and for a nationalist like him to make such a statement underscores just how much the conversation around Polish national defense has shifted over the last year — especially when it comes to decoupling from Ukraine. To be sure, at first glance the opposite seems true. On Wednesday, after all, Volodymyr Zelensky himself offered to help Poland build robust early-warning and air-defense systems, similar to those that Ukraine uses to counter such incursions.

That’s unsurprising: Poland’s success rate in shooting down its own Russian interlopers was shockingly low compared to Ukraine’s. For a country that has cultivated a reputation as Europe’s most promising military power, this is not only disappointing, but also geopolitically dangerous. While Poland has invested heavily in heavy weaponry like tanks, helicopters, aircraft, and missiles, the Russian assault has exposed a strategic blind spot in a piece of Warsaw’s defense architecture that, given the drone-heavy nature of the combat in Ukraine, could yet prove its Achilles Heel. For Russia, probing this space may have been exactly the point.

Nor are drones the only instance where Warsaw may soon need to learn from Kyiv. Teams of Moscow-backed assassins; covert bombings of strategic infrastructure; and maritime attacks originating offshore are all threats Ukraine has had to deal with, and which Poland must now be prepared to face too.

The timelines, too, will need to be expedited. Learning from Kyiv’s experience will no longer be a luxury that Nato states can push back for years — now that Russia has established new rules of engagement with the alliance, incursions of this sort may well occur with increasing regularity. Indeed, the timeline is likely much shorter than most observers in the West realize: Russia and Belarus are set to hold their first joint military exercises, called Zapad-2025, on Belarusian territory since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a few days’ time.

With the boots on the ground have come provocations: the last time the exercises took place in 2021 coincided with the start of the migrant crisis along the Polish-Belarusian border, a geopolitical headache that persists until today. In fact, and contrary to the claims of Kremlin apologists that some of Russia’s drones were meant for Ukrainian targets and merely veered off course, Tusk has warned that several arrived from Belarusian airspace, indicating that this wave may have been a prelude of things to come.

Yet if lessons from Ukraine will be instrumental in the ability of its western neighbors to adapt to this new reality, Kyiv may ironically find itself sidelined. For if Poland needs Ukraine’s help today — not least in countering drone incursions sustainably, either via its own drone forces or tactical teams on the ground — tomorrow it will likely turn its attention to its own skies. Poland, of course, has never directly played a role in defending Ukrainian airspace, but it has given Ukraine €4.5 billion in military aid since the war began, much of it coming from its own weapons stocks. Yet increasingly facing its own equipment shortfalls, future generosity may be harder. Last month, for instance, Ukraine asked Warsaw for a loan to purchase Polish-made weapons, and it remains unclear if the deal will go through.

Supporting Ukraine in its fight continues to make sense for countries like Poland in the long-term — after all, they are fighting the same enemy, and it benefits them both if their approaches are interoperable. Nevertheless, given the cold realities of the region’s security politics, decoupling its doctrines from Kyiv’s probably does make a brutal kind of strategic sense. But there’s more to it than that. Moscow has unsurprisingly already denied the drones in Poland were even of Russian origin and, according to an analysis by a Polish NGO, has fired up its online disinformation machine to blame Ukraine for the incursion. So long as future provocations continue to fall short of Nato’s Article V threshold, and the Kremlin can publicly deny responsibility for them, harassing the alliance directly will serve Russia in several clear ways.

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The most obvious is that it’ll pile additional pressure on the alliance to give in to Putin’s maximalist demands for an end to the war, which include surrendering the Donbas to Russia without any post-war security guarantees for Kyiv. Yet there is a more insidious motivation at play here too, and it’s one that many Poles, including politicians like Mentzen, are already embracing. By increasing the material, diplomatic, and psychological costs of supporting Kyiv, Putin is hoping to drive home the idea that supporting Ukraine’s defense is unsustainable in the face of more pressing security demands closer to home. New polls out last week show that for the first time since 2022, a slim majority of Poles oppose Ukraine joining Nato, a sharp increase from just 14% at the start of Russia’s invasion. That’s even as fewer than one-in-10 Poles think that their country is ready for a war with Russia.

Yet even if Poland moves towards self-reliance, it is unlikely that Russia will stop flexing its muscles in Nato border states. Indeed, what Ukraine-skeptics continually fail to understand is that even if Putin isn’t interested in conquering the territory of Nato states outright, despite his frequent suggestions to the contrary, what he seeks, at best, is their pliability. Seen from this perspective, disengaging Poland from Ukraine would only be the start from the Kremlin, which would use its successes in Eastern Europe as an invitation to press further. One demand might involve the removal of Nato military equipment and American forces from frontline states, whatever the wishes of the countries themselves. That could potentially even be part of an eventual peace deal in Ukraine. If history has taught Eastern Europe anything, it’s that when given an inch, Russia will take a mile.

Whether it continues to treat Ukraine as a part of its own defense or not, then, Poland’s fate after this dramatic escalation seems tragically clear — it and its neighbors will be the targets of “grey-zone” military actions by Russia for years to come. Despite their militarization, societies in Poland, Estonia, and beyond have largely been insulated from the direct impacts of their frontline position in Nato, but now that is changing. Residents of several eastern Polish regions, including Warsaw itself, received ominous text message alerts on Wednesday to watch out for drone activity overhead. That’s depressingly normal for Ukrainians, but a shock for their western neighbors.

And while this first drone incursion didn’t cause any casualties, it will only be a matter of time before actions like it lead to fatalities, and then, perhaps, to unwanted escalations — up to and including open war. Either way, a Rubicon has been crossed.

Combating human trafficking is all the rage in Europe these days, and for good reason — but while Germany, along with the rest of the EU, might be eager to cooperate with external neighbors such as Britain on the issue, internally, the challenge of irregular migration has produced bitter division, a resurgence of hard borders, and localized frontier policies that together threaten the unity of the Schengen Area itself.

Earlier this month, Poland became the latest Schengen state to reintroduce border controls along its frontiers, both in the west with Germany and in the northeast with Lithuania. The reason? Partly to combat people smuggling, but also the involuntary return of individuals across internal EU borders — by member states themselves. Unimaginable in the End of History days when Schengen was first devised, Poland is far from alone in subverting the zone. The Germans themselves, after all, are increasingly conducting their own border checks, with Poland and Czechia, along the way rejecting thousands of migrants trying to enter the country. In one especially surreal incident, vividly underscoring the contrast between how Berlin treats countries like the UK and its eastern neighbors, German police effectively abandoned an Afghan man in Polish territory, under cover of darkness, making their escape before Polish authorities could arrive.

The revival of European borders is nothing new. Several countries have restarted controls since the 2015 migration crisis, and then during the pandemic. What is new, however, is a growing sense that Schengen was always built on a false premise: that the countries of the zone share a common approach to territorial sovereignty, and can therefore function like a uniform state. This has never been true of course, but only in the last few years has it become so clear. And with its cross-border antics into Poland, Germany has demonstrated that even the EU’s prime mover no longer approaches Schengen in the spirit it was intended, and that what happens just beyond its own borders is no longer its concern. It all speaks, with shocking vividness, to how migration continues to haunt Europe, even if ultimate blame lies less with migrants themselves than with the continent’s bickering, bloviating leaders.

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Border security in a structure like Schengen only works if everyone is on the same page — and over the past decades, Europeans have made it abundantly clear that they are not. For years, this core paradox at the heart of how the system works has been written into the so-called Dublin Regulation, the system governing asylum applications in the EU. Under this regime, asylum claims may only be adjudicated by the country in which an asylum seeker is first fingerprinted by authorities, usually the first EU or Schengen country they step foot in. 

But because asylum seekers by definition arrive on the external borders of Schengen, this naturally puts enormous pressure on so-called “frontline” migration states, which by default are burdened with handling all the asylum cases for the entire bloc. For years, this piled pressure on Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Greece. But, starting in 2021, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia found themselves in similar straits, with the start of the migration crisis engineered by Lukashenko’s Belarus.

On the surface, Belarus’s antics were an attempt to weaponize migration, putting pressure on the external borders of the EU. But as time went on, it became increasingly clear that Minsk’s strategy strained the internal structure of Schengen too. Just as during the 2015 migrant crisis, when Syrian refugees made use of Schengen’s open borders to reach Germany and its generous immigration system, few migrants and refugees crossing into the EU from Belarus wished to stay in Poland — once again making their way to the social democracies of northwest Europe. For them, the fiction of Schengen as a single unified political entity is obvious, even from within its theoretically borderless expanse. The fact remains that certain countries are more attractive as destinations not just for economic reasons, but for policy reasons too.

Here, the Dublin system made it necessary for states to either refuse entry to migrants wishing to cross internal Schengen boundaries, or deport them back to their first country of entry — precisely setting the stage for the crisis underway today. Though Germany’s forcible transfer of that Afghan migrant made news in Poland, eliciting sharp words from officials in Warsaw, many similar returns were undertaken under the auspices of Dublin and thus were entirely legal.

Ultimately, though, Germany came to the same conclusion as Poland did when it came to dealing with asylum applicants on its own soil: if migrants are stopped from even entering its territory, then the whole asylum farrago can neatly be avoided. Poland took this approach to its logical conclusion when it suspended the right to asylum altogether in late 2024, swiftly copied by other EU states. And after Warsaw’s move was approved as legal by the bloc’s officials in April of this year, Germany’s new government decided to formally enshrine its practice of turning migrants back at the Polish border — something that, in an ironic twist, likely led to the very rise in migrant returns that convinced Poland to enact its own border checks.

If, however, Dublin isn’t working, the EU’s solution looks doomed too, albeit for basically the opposite reason. Passed in April 2024, the EU Migration Pact tries to bring order to the continent’s migratory Wild West. It implements a whole host of provisions, from streamlined asylum processing to expedited deportation procedures, but its most controversial element is the burden-sharing mechanism: requiring all EU member states to host migrants entering the bloc, or else to make financial contributions towards them elsewhere.

This kind of solidarity is all well and good in theory. Yet in the way it mandates a unified set of migration rules and procedures across the EU, while also asking states to take on responsibilities not directly on behalf of their own citizens, the Pact butts up against the precious autonomy that so many EU states have sought to carve out in this, the current age of independence-minded nationalism. While Dublin erred in making migration an exclusively local issue, subject to the whims of national governments, the Migration Pact errs in dramatically misreading the room.

Yet having rejected the Migration Pact, countries such as Poland and Hungary now believe they can engage in a spot of cakeism — preserving their sovereignty, and avoiding hosting migrants from other parts of the EU, while also continuing to bask in the warming sun of Schengen. In a sense, this approach is the essence of the new European Right’s vision of a Europe of sovereign states, where the EU exists as a weaker, purely economic union, while ties between individual members are constantly negotiated and renegotiated according to national interests.

But while the temporary border controls erected by countries across the EU may today seem like a compelling solution for filtering out illegal migration — while letting trade, tourists, and intra-EU labor flow with minimal hassle — such protocols would finally squeeze the ease of movement that has allowed Schengen to revolutionize European life since the end of the Cold War. Over time, it would kill the common visa policy too, and amid the constantly shifting geopolitical relationships of such a Europe, instability would inevitably soar, making border policy ever more fraught and complex.

Poland and Germany’s ongoing spat has already strained their relationship, while Austria, Germany, and Italy have pursued unilateral migration policies that have hurt their relations not just with Brussels — but also with each other. Despite not being a member of the EU, Turkey’s years-long confrontation with Greece over migration, which has at times spilled over into dangerous geopolitical posturing, presents an extreme case study in what may await Europe if states continue to dig in.

Where does all this leave Europeans? As bleak as it may seem, the answer is that there is no good way of bolstering the sovereign liberty of EU states on migration matters without also undermining the foundations of the Schengen Area itself. Conversely, crafting a continent-wide migration policy that actually works is impossible so long as Schengen members behave like fully independent states. Seeing as there is likely to be little appetite for a federal Europe anytime soon, the current border regimes are a shadow of the Europe that lies ahead — a divided, multi-polar continent, where realpolitik rules and where everyone is out for themselves.

While this may not seem like such a bad outcome for European conservatives tired of Brussels overreach, the truth is that countries like Poland and Greece would still need to deal with the same migration problems they face today. Now, though, they’d be going it alone, without recourse to any of the international laws or bodies that have given them support in their current struggles, however limited that may have been in practice.

Socio-cultural concerns about foreigners would also be moot here. With only one minor post-pandemic uptick, in 2021, the continent’s birth rates have continued to fall every year since 2016. With little hope that things will change course anytime soon, legal workers will regardless have to fill gaps in the labor force of this newly splintered Europe, changing the face of the continent with or without illegal migrants. Just this month, Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy announced it would issue 500,000 visas for workers from outside the EU; for years, Poland has led the EU in issuing residence permits for non-EU immigrants.

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Policies like these show that, on some level at least, European politicians understand that the current status quo of border checks and chest-thumping, absent any new ideas, is fundamentally untenable for the continent’s long-term future. And yet, trapped by a continent-wide attitude that favors retreat into a familiar yet narrow view of national interest, they have abdicated any sort of thinking about what European identity, and its place in the world, will look like in this new historical age. However naive the Europe of the Nineties may have been, it was nevertheless ambitious, imaginative, and boundary-pushing in its way. Today, that ambition, to imagine something better, has been replaced by a politics of fear, not just of migrants, but of what might come after the end of post-historical Europe.

While Euroscepticism is at an all-time high, very few actors on the continent actually want to leave the EU — they just want to rebuild it in their own image. The central question that Europeans need to ask themselves, then, is how committed they actually are to the European project, assuming they cannot cooperate enough to solve a problem like migration. Are European national identities really so fragile that they can’t survive collective action? Are they really willing to sacrifice something as groundbreaking as Schengen for short-term gains?

The unfortunate answer European leaders seem to have given is “yes”. Though some Schengen states may sooner or later be forced to band together, clarifying their open-border relationships in the face of threats like Russia, the truth is that there is little evidence that EU states will mature enough to solve their fundamental border problems.

For the moment, of course, Schengen isn’t dead — nor should it necessarily be dismantled merely because national leaders seem unwilling to coordinate. The benefits it offers Europeans continues to dramatically outweigh the costs. But keep stumbling and it might all count for nothing, as Schengen falls and Europe’s walls only continue to rise.

Since Nawrocki’s win, commentators of all stripes have been eager to pigeonhole the election as a win for Russia, as the MAGA-fication of Poland, or as the nail in the coffin of Poland’s warm relationship with Ukraine. In truth, it’s none of those things — politics here is never so simple. The razor-thin margin of Sunday’s election, and indeed the divided, hamstrung government that has existed here for the last 18 months, is emblematic of a deeper fight about the nature of Polish identity in the 21st century. Caught between a future at the heart of the EU, and the familiar, reassuring hearth of traditional Catholic values, Poland is scrabbling for its future, even as it faces the old security challenges Piłsudski knew so well.

In the first place, Nawrocki’s win has crystallized the resurgent ascendancy of the country’s Right, this time with a new anti-establishment cadre of Gen Z acolytes at its back. It’s true, of course, that the guiding star of this quintessentially Polish brand of nationalism lies not in Europe: but in Trump’s America. Not only do its true believers take a “Poland First” approach on immigration and security, but their views on taxation, government regulation, and gun ownership are much closer to Trump’s than those of the PiS. Having posed with Nawrocki during his visit to the Oval Office in May, Trump hailed him this week as an “ally” whose victory had shocked “all in Europe”. But regardless of what Poland’s populists do next, what the country has achieved over the last three or four years cannot be undone. Behind Nawrocki’s win lies the simple fact that this country has left its mark on Europe, becoming indispensable to the very stability of the continent no matter who’s in charge.

The seeds of Poland’s modern-day dualism were sown long before Donald Tusk, the country’s embattled centrist prime minister, took power in 2023. Rather, they stretch back to the twilight days of communist rule. In 1989, after years of chaos and martial law, the country’s Soviet-backed regime agreed to sit down for discussions with Lech Wałęsa and other Solidarity leaders. The talks were ostensibly to diffuse tensions — but in practice ended up setting the stage for the collapse of communism right across Eastern Europe. Alongside Wałęsa, Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński also attended the meetings, with the twin brothers going on to form the PiS in 2001.

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The PiS emerged from the ruins of Solidarity Electoral Action, a diverse coalition of parties created as the political wing of Solidarity in the mid-Nineties. Civic Platform, led by Tusk and supported by Wałęsa, was another party to emerge from the ashes of Solidarity Electoral Action. Though Tusk and the Kaczyńskis had common roots in Poland’s anti-communist center-right, in other words, by the early 2000s their paths had diverged. Civic Platform set its sights on EU membership, while the PiS defended the Polish social conservative tradition.

Over the next two decades, both parties led governments in Poland, while drifting further and further apart. After joining the EU in 2004, Poland reaped enormous economic benefits, not only becoming the fastest growing economy in Europe, but also gaining the rare distinction of being the only country on the continent not to experience recession in 2008. But in the eyes of the PiS — and the growing number of Poles who saw traditional Catholic values as central to their identity — the boom came with trade offs. Like other conservatives in Europe, they felt that on the road to European integration, something deep within the national soul had begun to slip away. Soon enough, they began to castigate Tusk, Civic Platform, and all liberal-minded Poles, dismissing them as foreign interlopers intent on selling the country out to the old German nemesis. For their part, Poland’s liberals returned the favor. Centered in the cities and more Left-leaning areas in western Poland, they characterized the PiS as the party of backward, provincial cultists, holding the nation back from fulfilling its ambitions.

The pivotal moment came in 2015, when the PiS won a majority in both houses of parliament and secured the presidency for Andrzej Duda, giving the party broad control over the country’s institutions. In the name of completing decommunization, the PiS reordered Poland’s courts, stacking the constitutional tribunal with loyal judges, all while tightening abortion laws, politicizing state media, and cracking down on LGBT rights. Amid the battles with Brussels that followed, Poland’s liberals no longer saw themselves merely as pro-EU advocates fighting to pull their country out of the prejudices of the village — they were now freedom fighters trying to save Poland from a hostile internal takeover.

Into this tumult stepped Russia. In 2021, when with Russian backing Belarusian dictator Lukashenko began luring migrants to the border of the EU, before forcing them to cross into countries like Poland, the PiS was catapulted into the European spotlight. The party was now not only defending Poland’s national character from the scourge of liberalism, but Europe itself from Putin’s hybrid warfare. The fact he chose migrants as his weapon of choice made things even more convenient — its fight against European multiculturalism had become intertwined with Poland’s ancient struggle with the Kremlin.

The start of the war in Ukraine further enhanced the PiS’s role on the European stage, taking Poland as a whole along with it. The party’s leaders became the face of Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, and the facilitators of Ukraine’s defense, as Warsaw got its first real taste of international prestige. But the moment also gave Poland something else — an opportunity to merge its EU aspirations with its traditional anti-Russian animus. Now, rather than challenging the European order, Polish nationalism was something the EU and NATO not only commended but actually demanded. In other words, then, the PiS had got the best of both worlds, and for a brief moment had bridged the divide that had been growing in Poland since Tusk and the Kaczyński brothers went their separate ways.

Yet before long, things fell apart once again, this time with help from a new brand of populist Rightists — for whom the PiS was an inadequate guardian of Polishness. Fueled by farmers’ protests over Ukrainian grain imports, anger over perceived preferential treatment of Ukrainians refugees, and a good dose of historical grievance over the unresolved massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War, the Polish far-Right, led by the Confederation Party, pushed the PiS to adopt an ever-harsher line on Ukraine. Not that Ukraine is the only issue these new nationalists care about. Worries about immigrants from non-European countries do too, even as Confederation also calls for economic libertarianism and continues the familiar refrain that Poland’s business interests and political future are being outsourced to Brussels insiders.

Even so, Ukraine has risen to become the essential issue of Polish politics. To be sure, rearming at home and backing NATO abroad are still causes that unify almost everyone from Warsaw to Wrocław. But for Confederation, and increasingly for the PiS too, they are no longer the Europeanist projects they once were — even as they have increasingly begun to see Ukrainians in Poland as an impediment to Polish sovereignty rather than a boon.

The pivotal moment in the PiS’s shift took place late last month, after the first round of voting, when Confederation’s candidate Sławomir Mentzen came third behind Nawrocki. That led Mentzen to invite his PiS rival to appear on his YouTube channel and make his case to Confederation’s voters ahead of the runoff. Without hesitation and on camera, Nawrocki signed a document in support of Confederation’s agenda, notably pledging to oppose Ukraine’s NATO membership. The PiS’s fellowship with Confederation was sealed, and the tactic largely worked: over 88% of Mentzen supporters in the first round voted for Nawrocki in the second. Whatever happens over the weeks ahead, it seems clear that Poland is headed for a PiS-Confederation coalition in 2027, with Tusk’s fragile coalition probably splintering.

For now, though, Poland will remain in stasis, with political gridlock set to continue. It’s ironic, then, that the very voters who ended up delivering Nawrocki his victory were those who’d once yearned for a more dynamic political landscape — and for more options outside the PiS-Civic Platform duopoly. Driven by frustration with the establishment, Mentzen’s effective and direct social media presence, and a desire to return to traditional Polish roots, a slim majority of young people voted for Right-wing populist parties in the first round of the election, subsequently supporting Nawrocki in the runoff. By embracing their desire for more radical ideas and aligning itself with Confederation in the long-term, the PiS may well reinvent itself too, ensuring the tug-of-war with Poland’s liberals remains as energetic as ever.

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For its part, Civic Coalition has had to adapt too. Despite his reputation as an urban progressive, Trzaskowski ran a more conservative campaign than expected, even going so far as criticizing some social programs for Ukrainians in Poland. Though it clearly didn’t help him, he won’t be the last liberal to appeal to the increasingly conservative masses before the decade is out. Having already moved Rightward on migration, Tusk is also flexing his conservative muscles on the European stage, for instance rallying against the Green Deal earlier this year by framing it as a threat to European competitiveness. In a testament to how much Poland has moved the needle on the continent, meanwhile, many other countries are now following Tusk’s lead.

We shouldn’t exaggerate here. Though his own days as prime minister are numbered, Polish liberals are unlikely to wholly cave to the rising Right anytime soon. The record turnout of Sunday’s vote proved that despite the country’s polarization, and despite the obstacles in their way, pro-EU Poles will continue to be a force to be reckoned with so long as there remains space for Poland at Europe’s top table.

Cliché though it may be, Poles are capable of overcoming their differences and banding together in the face of adversity. Back in the interwar years, Piłsudski shaped the country’s trajectory as he saw fit, but the Poles themselves were never able to get over their indecisiveness until the Nazis and Soviets came knocking in 1939. In today’s Poland, though, waiting that long may not be an option — a synthesis in national identity will necessarily have to emerge, not only for Poland’s own national security, but if Europe wants to defend itself against whatever Russia has in store for NATO’s east.

Poland’s longtime political divisions haven’t hampered its rise so far, but as it enters a new arena of geopolitical competition, the rules of the game have changed. If it hopes to expand its influence in Europe, solidify its brand — and resist Russian imperialism all at the same time — it will have to break through the glass ceiling currently limiting its rise. Once it does so, a vision that unites forward-looking Europeanism with a positivistic nationalism will be Poland’s only ticket in town. Even in the interwar years, Piłsudski understood this well. “Poland will be great,” the marshal once said, “or it won’t be at all.”

The Polish presidency, though largely ceremonial, matters because it is endowed with the power to paralyze the government. But yesterday’s result is more than a domestic triumph for Nawrocki and the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party that backed him; it has profound implications for Europe and the transatlantic alliance. To understand its significance, consider Poland’s extraordinary transformation over the past 25 years. It is arguably the most successful post-Cold War story in Europe. Just over two decades ago, when Poland joined the EU, it was a grim place that belched out people. Warsaw was a drab city dominated by a Stalinist tower. Today, Poland’s GDP is approaching $1 trillion. The living standards of its people are on a par (at least on paper) with Japan’s. Its armed forces are larger than the armies of Britain or France. Central Warsaw is clustered with skyscrapers. Poles who emigrated abroad in search of opportunity are returning home.

Those Poles who appreciate that so much of this would have been inconceivable without the EU regard the nationalist Nawrocki as a mortal threat to their country’s democratic progress and integration into the European project. When PiS was last in government, between 2015 and 2023, it tightened Poland’s already restrictive abortion laws, stacked the constitutional tribunal with loyal judges, set the country on a course of “legal exit” from Europe, and was sanctioned by Brussels. PiS was defeated in the parliamentary elections of 2023, when an ideologically kaleidoscopic coalition led by Civic Platform formed the government. That government has since been at loggerheads with the incumbent president of Poland, Andrzej Duda of PiS. A Trzaskowski victory would have cleared the way for Civic Platform to push through its agenda.

Nawrocki, inevitably, has been painted by European media as an existential danger, the figurehead of a nationalist wave sweeping the continent. These concerns are not entirely baseless — Donald Trump blessed Nawrocki in the Oval Office in early May; his Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, traveled to Poland and endorsed him — but they are perhaps exaggerated. Nawrocki is not a fascist, nor is he an aberration. He is a product of a specific moment in Polish politics, which are riven by competing ideas of sovereignty and identity. Lord Lugard, the Governor-General of Nigeria from 1914 to 1919, once said of his restive subjects that “their very discontent is a measure of their progress”. And so it seems with Poland. Its success has bred the climate for the re-emergence of atavistic impulses — religious, cultural — that had been suppressed in its people’s pursuit of prosperity. Poles, possessing an economy that is the envy of the continent, are now squabbling over what it means to be Polish and European, Christian and modern.

The presidential race has exposed the depth of division over these questions. The loser, Trzaskowski, is a polished career politician. A member of the Civic Platform party and an Oxford alumnus, he is liberal, competent, fluent in English, and admired in Brussels. As Warsaw’s mayor, he marched in Pride parades and ordered the removal of crosses from government buildings — a choice that, while earning him the adulation of metropolitan Poles, infuriated conservatives who see their civilizational history as being inextricably bound with the Catholic Church. Their champion is Nawrocki. He was born into extreme poverty in the port city of Gdańsk. Ports, particularly in impoverished places, tend to become familiar with organized crime, and Nawrocki was exposed to this world at an early age. He sought release in athletics, became a boxer, and occasionally participated in football brawls. Working as a security guard at a hotel, he is alleged to have procured prostitutes for guests. This is not the curriculum vitae of a defender of Christian values.

But the new president is the beneficiary of a deepening resentment among those Poles who — convinced that their social values are being eroded and their sovereignty endangered by liberal elites pandering to Brussels — are willing to trade character for belligerence. This sentiment is particularly acute in places such as Radom. An hour’s train ride from Warsaw, Radom was once a proud center of Polish political life. It was the site of the adoption of the 1505 constitution, the publication of the first codified laws, and the massive protests of 1976 against the communist government. Today, Radom is an object of mockery in the cities, “a national joke”, as one filmmaker in Warsaw put it to me. Its people are dismissed as gauche and gaudy.

Such snobbery reveals more than it conceals. Yes, compared to Warsaw or Kraków, Radom is a backwater. Its buildings are decaying, and despite the presence of a university and an airport, an outsider can feel overwhelmed by ennui. But the locals feel differently. The owner of a café and bar there told me that nowhere else in Poland or Europe did she feel the same sense of community. What galls its people, then, is the knowledge that so many of their own compatriots view them as inferior beings when they see themselves as a repository of so much that is worth preserving about their country. “A lot of Poles in the cities want to be British, French, or Italian,” one Radom resident told me. “We are proud to be Polish.” He was for Nawrocki. Trzaskowski labored away in the final days of the campaign to court the nationalist vote. Rather than win them over, his flip-flopping only served to alienate his own voters.

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Nawrocki profited too from a growing frustration with Ukraine in a nation that is still intensely hostile to Moscow. Since Russia’s invasion of 2022, Poland has granted a warm welcome to more than a million Ukrainian refugees. It has given them the same privileges as Polish nationals. Three years on, there is a tincture of outrage among Poles. As one Warsaw banker complained: “Some of them drive Lamborghinis, but what are they contributing to Poland?”

Emphatically not pro-Russian, Nawrocki is, in fact, on a list of wanted men in Russia for ordering the demolition of monuments to the Red Army in Poland. But his refusal to endorse Kyiv’s admission into NATO — a departure from PiS’s position — and his pledge not to send Polish soldiers to fight in Ukraine have worked to his advantage. “One million Ukrainian men have fled Ukraine,” a student at Warsaw University told me. “Why should we go and fight for them?”

Nawrocki’s Euroscepticism, and his alignment with US interests over EU integration, are bound to impair relations with Brussels, Berlin, and Paris. His election, reinvigorating the MAGA movement following the demoralizing defeat of Trumpist candidates in Romania, Australia, and Canada, will also energize populist movements on the continent. And his cautious posture towards Ukraine could strain NATO’s eastern flank and push more responsibility onto Western European states, though Poland’s NATO and EU commitments should limit the extent of any drastic shift.

But at home, Nawrocki’s election ensures that PiS retains its stranglehold on Poland’s governance. The suggestion that it paves the way for a broader PiS victory in the next general election does ignore, though, the extent to which the duopoly of PiS and Civic Platform — the two default parties of government — has disillusioned and pushed many young Poles to the extremes. In the first round of the presidential poll, fewer than 25% of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 backed either Nawrocki or Trzaskowski. This is a steep decline from the presidential election of 2020, when almost 45% of that demographic cast their ballots for the mainstream candidates. According to one recent study, young Poles express the deepest connection to Poland, but 80% of them feel that the government is preoccupied with the concerns of the elderly at the expense of the youth.

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Nawrocki’s great luck as he takes office, though, is the unwieldy nature of the government itself. Poland’s ruling coalition is a fragile alliance of social democrats, social conservatives, economic and social liberals, and centrists. He will continue the sport of obstructing government legislation or deferring its passage indefinitely by referring it to the constitutional court.

All of this means Donald Tusk’s reform program — particularly his efforts to overhaul the judiciary — is effectively dead. His government, in power for two years, is increasingly unpopular: a recent poll by CBOS shows that just over 30% of the electorate approve of it. During the campaign, Tusk proved a liability more than an asset. For more than two decades, Tusk has been a domineering presence in the Polish political scene. Addressing the nation on Monday evening, he put on a defiant performance, promising not to “take a single step back” and calling for a vote of confidence in his government. Far from calming his critics, the call for a vote has angered his coalition partners. He has sufficient numbers in parliament to sail through, but the only way out of the gridlock for Poland is a reconciliation of sorts between Tusk and Nawrocki — or a collapse of Tusk’s government. Either way, what lies ahead for Poland is a period of political chaos. Saving civilization doesn’t come cheap.

I’m in Puchły, at the Church of the Protection of the Mother of God, wooden, dark blue, and completed in 1918. The church is small and the village smaller: officially Puchły has a population of 42, but even that feels generous. Yet in tiny places like these, in the region of Podlasie, a whole forgotten world comes to life. For in this corner of northeast Poland, famed for its forests and its rare herds of wild bison, you can uncover a diversity mostly lost to Eastern Europe.

Those old ladies, after all, do not mumble in Polish, but in Podlachian, a microlanguage far closer to Belarusian and Ukrainian. Unusually for the homeland of Pope John Paul II, the babcias aren’t Catholic either. As the Cyrillic blessing on the archway of the Church of the Protection implies, the people here are Eastern Orthodox, sharing the Podlasie countryside with Lithuanians, Muslim Lipka Tatars, Jews. Some locals even continue to rely on szeptuns, folk healers who blend Orthodox and pagan practices. No wonder many Podlachian refer to their nationality simply as tutejsi — “from here”.

Over recent decades, though, people here have been under rising pressure to be from somewhere, the remorseless logic of nationalism pushing them to be Polish, or Belarusian, or even Russian. That’s especially true now, as literal walls go up right across Podlasie, and governments across the region prepare for future bloodshed. Yet that hardly means Puchły and its people are anachronistic, forgotten and marooned as the continent rearms. On the contrary, its borderless identity evokes both the deep past of Eastern Europe — and reminds us that another future is possible.

Places like Puchły were fired by history. Located in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose eastern lands were once known as Ruthenia, Podlasie was a place where varied identities could coexist without contradiction. This wasn’t due to some magnanimous vision of pluralism, but simply a reflection of reality. In the 16th century, the Catholic kings of the Commonwealth spoke Polish, a West Slavic language related to Czech. But most of their subjects spoke East Slavic tongues like Podlachian, and practiced Eastern Orthodoxy.

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Jews and Muslims were welcomed as merchants and warriors respectively, integrated as yet another layer in this complex society. One excellent example of the multifaceted nature of identity in Eastern Europe is the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. Born in modern Belarus, to a family with probable Jewish roots, he began his famous Polish-language epic Pan Tadeusz: “Lithuania! My fatherland!”

To a certain extent, this cultural richness endures in Podlasie. “On a daily basis, we speak Polish,” says Daria, a young Puchły parishioner, her light brown hair covered with a blue headscarf. “Or, like many in Podlasie, we speak po svojomu.” The phrase means “in our own way” — but though Daria is referring to the Podlachian language, it’s an elegant stand-in for the region’s broader identity. “For me, being from Podlasie, being Orthodox, is being someone who sticks to his own,” says Roman Ostapczuk, head of the nearby Koweła village, chomping on home-cured sausages and horseradish, an icon of the Virgin Mary hanging above our heads.

Nor do you have to speak Podlachian, or even be especially religious, to spot Podlachian pride. Puchły is one of several villages in a microregion evocatively known as the Land of Open Shutters. Here, houses, churches, and even bus stops feature ornately carved patterns, their wooden shutters painted the colors of the rainbow. Orthodox crosses guard the entrance of every village, while carved figurines adorn windowsills and shelves. Other cultural practices are distinctive too. Village choirs sing “in voices” — a style of belted singing typical of the region.

It’s tempting, then, to see this place as a kind of Disneyland of Slavic folklore. But that’d be wrong — and not just because there isn’t a tourist in sight. For if the long-dead Commonwealth was broadly indulgent of religious and ethnic diversity, recent decades have been far less gentle on Podlasie. During the interwar period, over a hundred Orthodox churches were destroyed by Polish authorities across the country. As the state religion of Tsarist Russia, an empire that had occupied parts of Poland for centuries, they were razed as an alien presence.

Despite enduring deportation to Siberia at the hands of invading Soviet forces from 1939, just like their Catholic compatriots, Orthodox communities in Podlasie were also targets of a racist “pacification” campaign once the Second World War was over. Led by rogue officer Romuald Rajs — nicknamed Bury, meaning “dark” or “grey” — a group of Polish partisans killed dozens of Orthodox civilians right across Podlasie, burning villages as they went. One middle-aged woman I met recalls being unwilling to even admit she was Orthodox as recently as several decades ago, for fear of being mocked as a kacapy: a Polish slur for Russians.

To be sure, Rajs’s actions were condemned by his superiors, and described as genocide by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance in 2005. But the age of nationalism isn’t easy to escape, with an extremist Polish fringe lately recasting Bury as a freedom fighter. And, in 2019, under the auspices of the Right-wing and strongly Catholic Law and Justice Party (PiS), the Institute of National Remembrance walked back on its earlier conclusions about Bury’s butchery. Not to be outdone, nationalists from across Poland have held annual marches in Hajnówka, ostensibly to honour various anti-communist fighters. But chants of “Bury, our hero” inevitably abound.

There are more contemporary geopolitical pressures here too. Before 1939, Poland’s borders extended deep into modern-day Belarus, placing Podlachian side-by-side with their Belarusian kin inside a single state. But the creation of a hard border, when Belarus became part of the USSR in 1945, separated mothers from sons, and villages that once shared a life ended up in different countries. More recent developments have spurred division too. Responding to a migration crisis, artificially set in motion by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Poland has erected a five-and-a-half-meter tall wall along its eastern frontier. Warsaw has also started a network of fortifications, and withdrawn from an international convention against anti-personnel mines, to guard against future Russian attacks.

These tensions show up in politics. Despite the traditional values of locals, the county town of Hajnówka has for decades voted for center-left parties in national elections. That’s in stark contrast to most of Poland’s east, where the PiS enjoys ironclad support. Beyond the electoral map, though, you really feel this opposition to PiS’s national vision from Podlachian themselves.

“I am not a Pole,” says Wiktor Stachwiuk, an author and philologist in Trześcianka, a village near Puchły. “I am a Belarusian, a Ruthenian from Podlasie.” Surrounded by a kingdom of manuscripts in his orange-shuttered living room, pouring generous shots of plum moonshine as he goes, Stachwiuk suggests that the Catholic Poles have “connected themselves mentally” with the West, preferring to be “with the British” than their Slavic cousins. Though he emphasizes he’s fervently opposed to the regimes of Putin in Russia and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, he laments the distance political borders in the region have created between him and and his brethren to the east.

Other Podlachians have gone the other way: citing their long presence on Polish soil, they’ve situated their unique local identity within a broader loyalty to the Polish nation. Either way, such attitudes are probably an inevitable consequence of the region’s hard borders — and of the forces, on both sides of the fence, that see Poland as a Catholic country with little space for Orthodox Podlachians. It hardly helps, of course, that the clergy itself has arguably muddied the waters. In early 2023, the head of the Polish Orthodox Church set off a media storm when he appeared to condemn Ukraine’s moves to establish its own separate church from Russia. Amid the backlash, Metropolitan Sawa was forced to apologize, denouncing Putin’s “criminal” invasion of Ukraine.

Unease is also heightened by the sense that Podlachian culture is at risk of vanishing altogether. When he was young, Ostapczuk recalls learning Polish as a foreign language. Now, though, the number of Podlachian speakers dwindles with each passing generation, and the number of people actively writing in it can be counted on two hands. Ostapczuk adds that his children today live their lives in Polish first and foremost, seeing Podlachian as a language tied to the home. For writers like Stachwiuk, then, putting the language to paper is not just about developing its literary tradition — it’s about giving Podlachian a kind of immortality. “This exists,” he proudly declares, showing me a book he wrote entirely in Podlachian.

Not that everyone here feels drawn to binary national labels that place Podlachian identity in opposition to Polishness. One example is Ostapczuk, who emphasizes he doesn’t want to be “pigeon-holed” as Belarusian — whatever language he grew up speaking. The historian and ethnographer Doroteusz Fionik has a name for this more intimate form of belonging. “The little fatherland is that place where a person feels best,” he says. “For the little fatherland, there are none of today’s state borders. The person doesn’t endeavor for those borders to change, the person just wants to be able to live comfortably in the place where he exists.”

Once again, history offers a guide here. Set amid the gentle bluffs north of Puchły, the Supraśl Orthodox Monastery is perhaps the most spectacular expression of the deep bonds between Poland and its Orthodox community. First built in 1503, all lofty towers and vaunted ceilings, the monastery’s Belarusian Gothic interior is dazzlingly ornate. At the back of the nave are vivid frescos showing the End of Days. Tellingly, the space features icons depicting both Orthodox and Catholic saints, while the monastery’s choral tradition combines Byzantine and Latin influences.

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In fact, the new church was only built in the Eighties, at the tail end of communist rule, after the original monastery was destroyed by the retreating Wehrmacht in 1944. Yet even that speaks to Supraśl’s hybrid identity. According to Brother Jan, a monk at the monastery, the Germans targeted this monument to Orthodoxy not to spite the Russians — but because they saw it as an expression of Polish identity that needed to be crushed. As Jan puts it: “This place was supposed to highlight what unites us, not what divides us.”

And if Supraśl has reemerged from the ashes of Poland’s bloody 20th century, there are other signs, too, that the “little fatherland” endures. Podlasie now boasts a pair of Belarusian language schools, and though younger generations may not speak po svojomu as much as their parents, activists like Stachwiuk are fighting to keep the tongue alive. Revivalists scored a major win when a song by a local duo, written in Podlachian, made it to the final round of Poland’s qualifications for Eurovision — the first time most Poles had ever been exposed to the language.

Yet as usual in this corner of Poland, politics threatens to smash this fragile identity. With growing heterogeneity within, and mounting threats without, the old Polish temptation to draw lines in the sand is starting to rear its head once again, with many urging loyalty to a single national ideal. For the country’s far-Right, gaining in polls ahead of presidential elections in May, the multifaceted landscape of Podlasie poses a challenge to their “us” and “them” vision of modern Poland.

Despite a respite of two years, ultranationalists returned to Hajnówka last month to hold yet another parade honoring the partisans who fought in the region — with Bury among them. Supporters of the far-Right Confederation Party came to protest the establishment of integration centers for foreigners in the region, a move funded by the Podlasie regional government and backed by many locals who view it as an expression of their historic openness to multiculturalism. And, after that Podlachian song’s success in Eurovision, the contest again turned into a theatre for nationalistic chest-beating, with online Rightists tying the language to Russia and Ukraine, calling it an attempt to “Ukrainianise” Poland.

But here, in Podlasie, the tutejsi know another way is possible. “If there is the term ‘Pole’ today, then we don’t have to imagine a Polish nationalist who shouts ‘Poland for the Poles!’” Fionik says. “We should move toward an understanding that when someone says ‘Pole’, we imagine that this is a person who loves his neighbor, no matter his faith.” A heartening sentiment — even if Podlasie’s little fatherland remains in danger.

Yet amid this spontaneous outpouring of fraternal affection, there was something else. You saw it on the graffiti, spattered on the walls of small Polish towns. “Banderites go home!” they read, a reference to the infamous Second World War-era Ukrainian militia leader Stepan Bandera, who Poles associate with a dark period of ethnic violence. You heard it, too, in whispered disapproval as sportscars with Ukrainian number plates glided by. Last year, Polish farmers blockaded the border, unhappy at how imported grain hurt their fragile bottom line. These motivations were hardly just economic, with allusions to expelling Ukrainians from Poland a regular refrain.

What started as a trickle has now become a flood. Surveys now find that a slim majority of Poles oppose sending additional weapons to Ukraine. There’s something else too: Poland’s ultranationalist Right, formerly on the country’s margins, has barrelled to the mainstream. According to two separate polls, Sławomir Mentzen of the Confederation Party has overtaken the Law and Justice Party (PiS) candidate to take second place in Poland’s presidential race. Even polls that show Mentzen behind PiS’s man show his support growing, and the difference between the two is now less than the statistical margin of error. If the numbers hold, May’s election could be the first without a PiS candidate in the top two spots for 20 years.

This result is far from guaranteed. As the longtime party of choice for Poland’s Catholic traditionalists, PiS commands a robust political network that won’t be upended easily. Yet having lost to a coalition of center-left parties in 2023, and with looming financial troubles biting at their heels, PiS is increasingly looking like the sick man of Polish politics, ripe for a challenge from the Right. More than that, and as the ominous references to Banderites imply, history is also ripe for a revival of anti-Ukrainian nationalism — even as the past hints at other futures for Poland and its people too.

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“There can be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine.” So goes a quote from Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the founding father of modern Poland, who ruled the country during the interwar period. The line has frequently been repeated by Polish leaders explaining why defending Kyiv is in Warsaw’s national interest. But this adage also speaks to something deeper within Piłsudski’s philosophy. Called Prometheism, the project aimed at weakening Russia by encouraging ethnic minorities in its empire to establish independent states of their own — much like Prometheus had uplifted humanity with the gift of fire. As for Poland itself, Piłsudski was a believer in pluralism and envisioned a multi-ethnic state that, supported by newly erected buffer states like Ukraine, would form a powerful bulwark against Moscow.

Of course, not everyone saw things that way. Roman Dmowski, Piłsudski’s chief political rival, advocated for a much less internationalist and diverse national identity. Rather, he envisaged an ethnostate for Poles, and only Poles, created by Polonizing or expelling minorities like Jews, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians. Though Dmowski held little real political power in interwar Poland, his National Democracy movement was a force to be reckoned with. Piłsudski pursued them relentlessly in his later years, arresting many of its members and leading the movement to effectively vanish by 1945.

Not that the Second World War brought understanding between Warsaw and Kyiv. Those references to Stepan Bandera remain so evocative because of what his Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists did as they tried to carve out an independent, ethnically Ukrainian state free of Polish interlopers. Allying themselves with the invading Germans in 1941, with the Nazis offering Bandera a measure of autonomy in their new world order, his followers massacred as many as 100,000 Poles living across what are modern Ukraine’s western fringes. Their actions, along with Russian population transfers at the end of the war, ultimately resulted in the wholesale expulsion of Poles from the area around Lwów, a city which had been part of Poland during the interwar years. By 1947, Polish Lwów had been redubbed Ukrainian Lviv — and at least 100,000 Poles had been driven from their homes.

The long decades of Soviet tyranny were unsurprisingly fallow for the Polish far-Right, while the early post-communist years were focused on building a new capitalist economy. Yet in the 2010s, a new far-Right party emerged in Poland. Called the National Movement, it branded itself the spiritual successor to Dmowski’s National Democracy. Among its founders was Krzysztof Bosak, who having been elected to the Polish Parliament at the age of 23, was then the second youngest MP in the body’s history. In 2019, Bosak’s National Movement entered into a coalition with another Right-wing party, and the Confederation Party as we know it today was born.

In those early days, Confederation was considered too extreme to pose a serious challenge to Poland’s political duopoly, with the PiS battling the centrist Civic Platform. Its ranks were filled with sexists, Russophiles, and anti-Semites. Perhaps the most notorious example here was Grzegorz Braun, who in 2023 used a fire extinguisher to put out the candles of a menorah in the Polish Parliament. Since then, and much like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, Confederation has tried to “detoxify” its image, expelling the likes of Braun and focusing instead on liberal economic policy, libertarianism, and a Poland First strategy on the international stage.

Instead of fielding dreary ideologues like Bosak, who gained a mere 7% of the vote when running for president in 2020, the party also found a new champion in Mentzen, who holds a PhD in economics and enjoys the largest following of any Polish politician on TikTok. With his no-holds-barred, unfiltered diatribes against rival politicians, Mentzen knows how to whip his online crowd into a frenzy, and even Poles who don’t support him often find his viral content popping up on their feed. If the latest polls are to be believed, Mentzen has more than tripled the party’s support since Bosak’s campaign.

Mentzen is certainly not without baggage. In 2019, for instance, he infamously stated that Confederation wanted a Poland without “Jews, homosexuals, abortions, taxation and the European Union”. He later claimed he was joking — at least about the Jews. His 2025 campaign website outlines an assertive agenda that includes cracking down on illegal migration; lowering taxes; combating “Leftist ideology”; continuing to build up Poland’s armed forces; opposing any Polish troops in post-war Ukraine; and standing up to the EU, among other provocative ideas.

Yet despite not being mentioned in his platform, a core part of Mentzen’s appeal has been his uncompromising language on Ukrainians. “They treat us like suckers,” he said in a TV interview this month. “We are sending weapons, money, social benefits to Ukraine, we are treating Ukrainians in Poland for free. In return we get slander, they insult us and show absolutely no gratitude.” Mentzen certainly is not calling for the forced assimilation or expulsion of Ukrainians. Yet in an echo of Dmowski nearly a century ago, his central message is that the Polish state must prioritize the wellbeing of ethnic Poles above all else. Mentzen personally alluded to the dark history between Poland and Ukraine last month when he visited Lviv, where he condemned the city’s numerous statues of Bandera. In response, Kyiv branded him an “enemy of Ukraine” and accused him of “inciting ethnic hatred”.

The distinction Mentzen therefore makes is not one of citizenship or residency — but of blood, culture and spirit. And, in the eyes of Confederation, this is where PiS got things wrong. Though the party took a hard line on illegal migration while in power, it not only welcomed millions of Ukrainians, but also encouraged the arrival of thousands of legal immigrants as cheap foreign labor. In fact, Poland under PiS has led the EU in granting first residency permits to foreign workers from outside the bloc since 2017. The party was also implicated in a visas-for-cash scandal shortly before the 2023 elections, ultimately costing the party its grip on power.

Karol Nawrocki, PiS’s candidate in this election cycle, has scrambled to align himself more closely with Confederation’s position on immigration. But Polish populists apparently aren’t buying it — at least not enough to keep Mentzen at bay. Yet if Rafał Trzaskowski, the Civic Platform’s candidate, will almost certainly win the election, his party’s government has also shifted its policies. That’s clearest around its approach to a post-war Ukraine. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has repeatedly refused to commit Polish soldiers to any future peacekeeping force, the subtext being that Poland may find it needs its troops at home instead.

As the best-armed state in the region, Poland will likely be forced to deploy its soldiers to Ukraine sooner or later. But the fact Tusk feels compelled to temper his party’s platform speaks to Confederation’s rising soft power. This is likely to only continue. Poland remains much less diverse than the multi-ethnic nation inhabited by Piłsudski and Dmowski, to say nothing of Western European states like France or Britain. All the same, this is a country whose national makeup is indeed changing, especially in urban areas, inevitably fueling Confederation’s ultranationalist vision.

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Though it won’t replace PiS anytime soon, then, it’s only a matter of time before Mentzen becomes the primary force on Poland’s Right. Yet here, again, history may make itself felt. Forget Dmowski or the Banderites — the country’s past encompasses an even broader paradox. Despite Piłsudski’s efforts, after all, modern Poland is unaccustomed to being a regional hegemon, let alone an empire, and has resisted several opportunities to become one. Even at the height of its power, in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the largest states in Europe, the country’s potential was squandered by a self-interested nobility.

Today, Poland once again finds itself wobbling between narrow isolationism and a leading role in Europe, one that would require it to become a guarantor of security far beyond its own borders. This, it goes without saying, would encompass many more people than simply ethnic Poles. Confederation’s rise is at least in part a response to this geopolitical moment and aims to force Poland’s leaders to make a choice between two futures that’ll dictate the country’s future for decades to come.

Aside from certain details, this choice is the same one that Piłsudski and Dmowski offered Poles a century ago. Though Piłsudski eventually emerged victorious, his plans were cut short by his own death, by the annihilation of Poland in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and by the country’s long domination by the Soviet Union. Now, though, Poland may finally have a chance to revisit the matter and settle it once and for all. Because while history doesn’t repeat itself, it certainly rhymes — in Poland more than elsewhere.

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.

Poland’s cultural renaissance couldn’t have started under grimmer circumstances. Back in 2022, when war came to Ukraine, Warsaw quickly established itself as a key player in the broader Nato network. Yet amid the turmoil on Poland’s eastern border, and its robust support for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the country’s broader image was shifting too. Already, it had successfully emerged from Eastern European obscurity and taken on various associations in the Western mind, from a bulwark of Catholic traditionalism to an alternative destination for American tourists who want to experience “Europe” without the crowds or Parisians. 

Yet it’s online that Poland has truly found a new life in mainstream culture, where vodka-soaked stereotypes are falling away. Among some obscure circles, that’s been true for years: starting in the 2000s, Polish users on forums like 4chan pioneered memes like Polandball and Wojak, the “feels guy” that continues to dominate the internet today. Starting in 2007, meanwhile, The Witcher series of video games won the hearts of players everywhere, and was later adapted into a Netflix series. 

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Yet while these aspects of Poland’s digital patrimony have surely had a lasting impact among young online men, their broader reach was limited. No less important, their connection to Poland itself was often lost along the way: how many people watching Henry Cavill slay monsters really knew his character had been invented by a novelist from Łódź? In practice, that meant Poland long punched below its weight as a driver of internet culture, despite being Europe’s fifth most populous country, its sixth largest economy, and a leader in the use of digital services.

But as Poland’s political star soared, the country has secured a new and unlikely online audience: Gen Z. This odd-ball surge in enthusiasm was partly down to luck. It all started in November 2022, when an errant missile crashed in an eastern Polish field. After realising the incident was a mistake, rather than the precursor to a Russian invasion, the media quickly moved on. But, remarkably, the episode coincided with the release of Poland, a hit song by rapper Lil Yachty. 

Whether due to the fortunate timing, or anyway thanks to the absurdism of a codeine-fueled hip hop anthem, the track went viral. Despite having little to do with Poland itself, meanwhile, the song’s music video, which currently has 33 million views on YouTube, also happens to feature Polish flags flying beneath the medieval walls of Kraków. Soon enough, Mateusz Morawiecki, the country’s then prime minister, had invited Lil Yachty to explore Poland for real. Last year, the rapper ended up performing the song six times at the Open’er Festival in the northern city of Gdynia.

This past summer, Poland found itself in the spotlight again, when notorious YouTuber and streamer IShowSpeed visited the country while on a transatlantic tour. He was impressed, declaring it “low-key the best country in Europe.” That was swiftly followed by Quavo, another rapper who posted a video of himself stopping in a Polish bakery. Amid the doughnuts and animal-shaped cookies, the clip garnered over two million views on Instagram. 

Taken together, Poland had now come to the attention of Gen Z, whose memes mocking IShowSpeed run-ins with the intricacies of the Polish language have spread like wildfire. In contrast to Poland’s rather obscure online presence over previous years, these new bits of micro-culture have had tangible effects in the offline world: I soon found myself discussing Polish memes at actual parties with real people. I’m apparently not alone. Sales of a Polish bottled water brand, and accidental star of one famous meme, have apparently risen since IShowSpeed’s visit.

What stands out about the internet’s encounters with Poland over the last two years is a sense that netizens experience the country as it exists. That’s a change from the old historical cliches, of winged hussars and ugly apartment blocks, that have plagued its image for decades. Just as importantly, Poland is today seen as a standard-bearer for that “other” Europe, one online Americans are rarely exposed to. In internet narratives about Poland’s place in Europe and the world, Warsaw and Wrocław are increasingly lionised, in contrast to the over-saturated western side of the continent. Not unrelated, some recent online praise for Poland carries with it the whiff of nativism, with the country lauded for its safety, cleanliness, and supposed preservation of a “pure” and homogeneous European culture — an inaccurate stereotype that’s anyway been dampened by the defeat of the Right-wing Law and Justice Party in last year’s elections.

Yet the most enduring exhibit of Poland’s online influence aren’t fashy Instagram reels about Polish cities “free” of migrants, but rather an off-beat meme. As far back as 2012, Polish social media users started posting videos of themselves following beavers, usually at night, and exclaiming “Kurwa bóbr!” — which roughly translates to “Fuck, a beaver!” Despite an illustrious history in Polish online communities, the meme shot to wider fame in 2023, when a video of such an encounter gained 30 million views on TikTok.

While the phrases foreigners associate with Italy or France are friendly greetings, it’s been Poland’s destiny to become closely associated with a swear word. And though kurwa is used right across Central and Eastern Europe, it’s safe to say Poles have monopolised the term’s brand. As beaver memes spread across the internet, so too did the popularity of kurwa, which skyrocketed on both sides of the Atlantic from the end of last year. 

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The beaver meme phenomenon, and the associated use of kurwa, has become as intimately connected to Poland online, just as the faux pas of breaking spaghetti has to Italy and the supposed blandness of the food has to Britain. Underneath the meme’s absurdity lies an uncompromising honesty that’s unequivocally Polish, even as it hints, paradoxically, at the country’s newly robust presence on the geopolitical stage.

What all this means for Poland’s future cultural impact is unclear. But what’s indisputable is that as its voice becomes increasingly vital to European politics, the country’s online clout will only grow. And if its appeal at this phase remains quirky and irreverent, the power of the Polish brand will, I think, eventually translate to cultural heft on a par with that of its famous western neighbours. Offline, the stage has already been set for such a transformation. Polish cuisine, long enjoying a patronising reputation as comfort food, lately received official recognition when a local soup was named the second best on earth.

Alongside its famous tradition of video game development, Polish cinema has also been praised by Hollywood filmmakers, even as Poles have scooped up Nobel Prizes as recently as 2018. Of course, beaver memes may seem like a long way from such highbrow engines of the country’s soft power. But in our terminally online world, one sphere drives the other. Though Poles might cringe at the thought, then, a day is coming when kurwa bóbr is as widely understood as bonjour, danke and gracias. 

But geopolitics is never so simple, and the nature of conflict has changed dramatically since then. As Russia’s hybrid-war against Poland since 2021 has demonstrated, the latter has had to face a growing and increasingly complex set of pressures from both the Kremlin and its ally Belarus that Nato has had little ability to combat. And since 2022, despite its hopes that its worst security fears could be safely confined to history, Poland has witnessed foreign projectiles striking its territory for the first time since the Second World War.

Although the errant Ukrainian air defence missile that killed two Poles during a Russian barrage on Ukraine in November 2022 garnered the most international attention, incidents of this sort have continued to take place since. In May, I wrote about the discovery of a Russian missile in central Poland that had flown undeterred for up to 500 kilometres before landing just west of a major Polish city, and most recently, in late August, Polish authorities reported that a Russian drone had entered Polish airspace and likely crashed into its territory.

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In the days since, Polish ministers have stated that they have not been able to find any trace of the drone, and have qualified their previous claims. Nevertheless, such apparent penetrations of Poland’s hard-won security bubble have come as a shock to the Polish public, whose historically ingrained aversion to aggressive foreign intrusion has made it eager to support proactive measures to defend every inch of the country. In the wake of the most recent incident last month, a survey found that 59% of Poles unequivocally supported Poland shooting down Russian projectiles moving in the country’s direction while still in Ukrainian airspace, which would give Polish pilots and air defence systems ample time to respond to them before they have a chance to threaten Poland itself.

Calls for such a bold change in policy have been growing in Poland since the spring, and finally reached a fever pitch this week when Poland’s outspoken Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski told the The Financial Times that it is the country’s  “duty” to down Russian missiles heading toward Polish, and by extension Nato, territory. A proposal to do exactly that had been featured in a landmark defence cooperation agreement signed by Ukraine and Poland back in July — but had been quickly rebuffed by Nato’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who claimed such moves could risk the alliance “becoming a part of the conflict” in Ukraine. Following Sikorski’s most recent comments, in which he claimed that Poland’s Nato membership should not stop it from pursuing its own security agenda, Nato spokespeople have doubled down on Stoltenberg’s pronouncement, claiming that Nato “is not a party to the conflict and will not become a party to the conflict”.

Nato, however, has offered no alternative solutions for how to handle the spillover from the war in Ukraine onto its territory. The European Union too, despite endorsing a Polish-Greek proposal earlier this year for the construction of a pan-European air defence infrastructure, has allowed discussion of the matter to languish in meetings. A disconnect between the alliance’s leadership and its eastern members, who have for years been lauded as its future visionaries, is painfully evident — while cautious Nato and EU leaders in Brussels are most concerned with the optics of such a change in policy and what it may mean for Nato’s role in Ukraine, in countries like Poland, the issue is far from an abstract one, and is connected to immediate national security concerns that require creative solutions within the active Ukrainian battlespace itself. If Nato is unwilling or unable to provide solutions for the threats Poland regularly faces over its own airspace, the least it could do is get out of the way to let Poland keep itself safe in whatever ways it sees fit.

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The reality is that Nato is an alliance that was built to respond to the risks of the Cold War and the post-1945 era, and its Article V provision only truly protects Poland and other countries along its eastern flank from outright invasion or aggressive attack. Wayward missiles and drones that “accidentally” enter Nato airspace are much more difficult to guard against, and are thus able to fly under the radar (pun intended) of Nato’s collective defence framework while still posing a very real risk to the alliance’s member states.

Such incidents are not just a Polish problem either — Russian drones have repeatedly breached and crash landed in Romanian territory since 2022 as well. But even beyond Nato’s east, looking at the big picture, the prospect of enemy projectiles recurrently hitting its soil in the absence of any real policy that would deter them is a recipe for disaster, and makes an eventual Article V declaration against Russia more likely than if member states were allowed to preemptively shoot its missiles and drones down before they reached Nato territory. Despite Nato’s claims otherwise, and certainly in Russia’s eyes, the alliance is already a participant in the Ukraine conflict, and pretending otherwise is potentially much riskier than walking on eggshells to avoid provoking a Russian escalation. 

Poland and other frontline states would hardly be the first actors to look out for their own well-being by downing projectiles flying around in their own neighbourhood, even those not intended to hit their territory. During Iran’s attack on Israel in April, the Jordanian Air Force proactively took out dozens of Iranian drones that entered its airspace en route to their destination, and although Iran certainly wasn’t pleased, no physical Iranian threat against Jordan has since materialised. Russia too can talk tough, but as it has shown time and time again throughout the war, its threats of escalation amount to little more than an uptick in sabotage activity against the West and headline grabbing provocations against frontline states. There is little more Moscow could realistically do, especially in this case — intentionally striking a Nato state in response to missile interceptions over Ukraine or anywhere else would not only be incredibly disproportionate, but would cross the threshold into triggering the alliance’s Article V tripwire. Until a truly existential threat emerges to Russia or its military might, low-grade hybrid warfare will be the name of the game. 

The debate about states like Poland and Romania using their air defence architecture to shoot down Russian missiles has another dimension however — if these countries have the capacity to take out projectiles moving toward their borders, what’s stopping them from shooting down any Russian missiles within the range of their surface-to-air missiles over Ukraine? This is exactly what Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has been pushing allies to do since June, suggesting that Poland use Patriot missile systems stationed along its borders to effectively create a no-fly zone over western Ukraine. The implications of such a solution would be enormous for security in the country — with a range of 160 kilometres, strategically placed Polish Patriots would be able to provide air cover for Ukrainian cities like Lviv and Lutsk, which have both been pounded by Russian missiles over the past month.

Whether or not Poland will have the necessary assets to secure its own skies as well as those of Ukraine’s west remains an open question, but within the emerging paradigm in which Polish leaders like Sikorski have appeared willing to act independently of Nato on certain security matters, such a scenario is no longer entirely off the table. While Poland will likely be wary of openly defying Stoltenberg’s dictums for the time being, its rising star within Nato means that where Warsaw goes, so eventually goes the alliance. Poland’s clout may well allow it to bring a new security framework into being that gives frontline states greater leeway to protect themselves and their borders without micromanagement from Nato HQ — and all of Nato will be better for it.

Yet history’s severed heads have a troublesome habit of growing back. The Russian invasion of Ukraine served as a powerful reminder of this reality for the European mainstream, but other unresolved threads of the continent’s brutal and very recent past have also re-emerged in much more subtle ways.

Last week, Poles had hoped that one such long unresolved injustice, the matter of German reparations for the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, would be clarified during German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to reset German-Polish relations under Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s new government. Back in 1953, under the rule of a Soviet-backed puppet government, Poland had formally renounced its claims to much of the reparations it had been promised, leaving the matter unsettled for decades. Yet the issue resurfaced under the previous Law and Justice Party (PiS) government, which, in an effort to appeal to its nationalistic base, argued that the 1953 declaration was inadmissible since it had been made by a government beholden to Russian interests. PiS intensified its efforts in 2022, when it formally requested that Berlin pay Poland over €1.3 trillion in reparations — the total estimated value of Polish wartime damages as determined by Poland’s Jan Karski Institute for War Losses. Although Tusk had previously supported such moves, his government appeared to soften its stance earlier this year, and signalled it was open to receiving other forms of compensation aside from cold hard cash. 

Tusk’s new approach and Germany’s newfound willingness to address the reparations issue didn’t emerge from a vacuum — both Poland’s swing from Eurosceptic populist rule to a pro-Brussels centrist government and the recent Rightward shift in the European Parliament have scrambled politics within the bloc. Despite its ultimate loss in this weekend’s elections, the recent success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has forced Scholz to prepare for an unruly France in years to come and to look for allies wherever he can find them — opening the door for a rapprochement with a newly sympathetic Poland.

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At the joint press conference in Warsaw, though, despite saying all the right things about “a clear view of the past” and the “unmeasurable suffering” of Poles at the hands of Germany, Scholz dashed any hopes that Poland would receive anything close to what it is truly owed. Instead, he spoke of compensation for the few thousand still-living Polish victims of the Third Reich, the opening of a house of memory for such victims in Berlin, and closer defence cooperation with Poland along its eastern border with Russia and Belarus. In response to questions from journalists, he indirectly invoked Germany’s official state position that the 1953 decision had been legally binding, and that Berlin was no longer responsible for fulfilling its reparations obligations to Poland.

The backlash in Poland was immediate, and alongside the predictable criticism from PiS leaders such as President Andrzej Duda, commentators across Polish media denounced Scholz’s comments as “a sign of disregard for the Polish side by our Western ally and partner”. The importance of the matter to everyday Poles was also confirmed shortly after the visit — a new survey released last week found that a majority of Polish citizens supported continuing to demand compensation from Germany for the war.

Getting Germany to pay the full cost of reparations to Poland was always going to be a Herculean task politically, and PiS’s all-or-nothing approach had been bound to fail. But even in trying to make good with a Polish government that had pivoted back to his camp after years of PiS rule, Scholz offered Poland — which proportionally suffered more civilian deaths than any other nation during the war — little more than symbolic gestures and nice words about German guilt, all while leaning on flimsy, decades-old legal arguments. This attitude plays into a long-running and convenient logical fallacy that has allowed modern Germany to divorce itself from its Nazi past: that because it has reformed itself ideologically and spiritually since the Third Reich, it deserves to be tacitly absolved of its sins without having to foot the bill for them in full. 

This attitude, which hardly started with Scholz, underscores the enduring lack of understanding among modern German leaders when it comes to contemporary Polish political identity. Although wartime reparations themselves may not be front-of-mind for every Pole, Scholz’s unserious approach to the matter speaks to a much broader concern Poles have about Western Europe’s continued inability to treat their country with dignity in the international arena — especially at a time when Poland has become so crucial for countering the increasing threat to the continent from Russia. 

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This isn’t to say that Germany has been wholly dismissive of the reparations issue. In 1992, two years after German reunification, Berlin did in fact pay Poland a portion of what it was owed, granting Polish victims of the Nazis around €295 million before disbursing additional funds for Poles who had been forced into slave labour in years afterward. But throughout its relationship with Germany, Poland has repeatedly had to balance its historical grievances with the needs of the present. In 2004, shortly after Poland joined Germany as a member of the EU, the Polish government itself issued a statement confirming that it had lost its right to full reparations in 1953. In the interest of European integration, Poland found it more advantageous to let go of history and satisfy itself with what it had received from Germany, at least for the time being.

Yet on the eve of yet another opportunity to gain the recompense that their country is owed, Polish leaders’ contemporary political interests appear to have trounced earnest desires for full historical justice once again. With his eye on Poland’s most immediate concerns, Tusk declared that he had heard what he needed to hear from Scholz and agreed to effectively put the wrongs of the past aside in exchange for Germany’s help with the pressing security challenges on Poland’s doorstep.

It would, however, be in Tusk’s interest to keep up the pressure on Scholz to satisfy Poland’s demands. Arguments that he has been too conciliatory towards Germany and other European heavyweights have historically been easy fodder for the narratives of PiS and other Right-wing parties, and although Tusk’s party came out on top in Poland’s European elections last month, the far-Right Confederation party’s strong showing should set off alarm bells in his mind about the future of Poland’s electorate. His failure to secure meaningful reparations at such an opportune moment in Poland’s relationship with Germany would haunt his political prospects not only with Poland’s Right, but also with parts of his own base, too. While it may indeed be the case that Poland has no leg to stand on with regard to reparations under international law, as Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said in February of this year, “the issue of moral, financial and material compensation has never been realised”.

This point is particularly salient because the reparations process at the end of the war was indisputably tarnished by politics and corruption. At Potsdam in 1945, the Western Allies gave the USSR the right to dispense reparations from Germany on behalf of Poland, which, after the war, became a Soviet satellite state. Poland received only a portion of the machinery, raw materials and military hardware the Soviets seized from Germany on its behalf after the war, until of course the USSR compelled Poland to make its 1953 declaration in an effort absolve communist East Germany from further obligations. As a result, the country that would have likely benefited the most from its full share of reparations was robbed of them prematurely — a reality that, while unchangeable in the eyes of the law, remains otherwise indefensible to this day.

Germany has been critical for Poland’s post-Cold War development and national security, which has made these historical loose ends difficult to satisfactorily address. But adequately dealing with history and developing a mutually beneficial relationship should not be a binary choice — the latter would only be strengthened through the former. And even if full reparations to the tune of over €1 trillion is out of reach, alternative forms of compensation, like rebuilding historical buildings the Nazis destroyed across Poland, additional funds for economic development, and payments not just to still-living survivors, but also to the countless families across Poland that remain impacted by the war almost 80 years later are all on the table as substitutes.

Satisfying such material demands would be a step towards not only closing the darkest chapter in Polish-German relations and delivering justice for its victims, but also affirming that Poland is indeed an equal partner to Germany in a rapidly changing EU. While Europe’s West may be content to live out its post-historic fantasy, in Poland and other eastern members of the bloc, the past haunts our lives at every turn. As it becomes clearer that the EU’s destiny will be defined by its eastern half, acknowledging this and addressing it seriously is no longer a luxury for the European mainstream — rather, it has now become central to its very future. 

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.

With Poland’s farmers once again demonstrating against EU rules favouring Ukrainian food imports, Tusk has responded in a manner hardly suited to a princeling of the EU. In the short-term, to keep the peace with Europe and Ukraine, he has promised to find solutions to farmers’ grievances within existing EU regulations. But more broadly, and quite unexpectedly, he has chosen to keep in place import bans on Ukrainian grain implemented by his Right-wing, Eurosceptic predecessors. He has also said he will oppose an extension of the EU’s free trade deal with Ukraine that has driven many farmers and truckers to despair, and his government recently announced tighter controls on imported goods at the Ukrainian border.

It seems, then, that Poland’s new protectionism is here to stay, as is the influence of its rural populist movement. While solidarity with Ukraine remains strong in the country, the impact of the war on Poland’s fragile agricultural sector has grown too large to ignore — footage has already emerged allegedly showing Polish farmers angrily dumping grain from Ukrainian trucks at one border crossing. Tusk’s government has taken note, and is striking a careful balance between its vital security relationship with Ukraine and the interests of its constituents.

Despite making pledges during the election campaign last year to differentiate himself politically from his predecessors, Tusk has to show that on some matters, he too can play the nationalist — and can also take the fight to Brussels on issues that matter for everyday Poles. Crucially, one often overlooked reality for Tusk is that he sits at the head of a diverse coalition in Poland’s Parliament that includes not only centrists and leftists, but also somewhat more conservative parties and agrarian movements that are critical for his ability to govern. Whether he’s accommodating these protectionist concerns out of genuine concern for farmers, out of a desire to save face politically, or in the interest of placating his own coalition remains unclear, but his position in the wake of these protests is a clear break from the norm for someone who was once widely seen as the face of the EU establishment itself. This is, in other words, the moment to prove his worth.

And it’s been a long time coming. Today’s protests have their roots in last year’s Polish grain crisis. In spring, the EU struck a deal with Poland allowing for Ukrainian grain to be transported through the country but not introduced into the marketplace. When that deal expired in September, Poland’s previous government introduced an import ban on cheap Ukrainian wheat and maize in order to protect Polish farmers from collapses in grain prices. But farmers felt this didn’t go far enough. In November, they joined forces with disgruntled Polish truckers and blockaded the Ukraine border, complaining of the market threat posed by other imported Ukrainian food products and agitating for agricultural subsidies and favourable taxes.

Meanwhile, during last year’s bitter election campaign, Poland’s populist government drummed up nationalist concerns about the Ukraine war’s impact on the Polish market. Nor did it help that the Ukrainian side escalated the situation further, suing Poland and several of its neighbours in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) for their import bans.

Since taking power in December, Tusk has sought to rebuild the relationship between Poland and Ukraine. On his first visit to Ukraine as Prime Minister in January, he claimed that he and Zelenskyy had “reached a common understanding” on both the border blockade and the farmers’ protests. He was, however, careful not to mince his words: “Poles want to help Ukraine,” he said on a previous occasion last month. “But they should not be put at a disadvantage. And least of all by the Ukrainians themselves.” Further negotiations on Ukrainian food imports will reportedly be held in Warsaw in March.

It is in Tusk’s interests for these to go well. While Tusk doesn’t have the same electoral reasons to play nice with rural voters as his political competitors last year, he cannot afford to further alienate the country’s agricultural class if he wants to protect his coalition’s fragile parliamentary majority — and especially if he wants to move forward with his ambitious and highly disruptive agenda to reform Poland’s state institutions. And although much of his and his political allies’ electoral support in last October’s elections came from major cities and their suburbs, many villages and towns across Poland’s rural west and north also carried his coalition to victory, meaning that his government very much has skin in the game when it comes to agricultural politics.

But Polish farmers have more varied concerns than just trade from Ukraine: recently revived protests have also voiced opposition to the European Green Deal, among other EU policies. For Polish leaders, though, this may be rather convenient. “We understand these protests, which are not targeted at the Polish government, but at the restrictions imposed by Brussels on farmers,” said Deputy Agriculture Minister Stefan Krajewski. Another deputy in the ministry, Michał Kołodziejczak, said that the EU’s policies had reached a “dead end”.

Though Tusk is a long way from personally winning the trust of Polish farmers, his coalition contains politicians who have long been sympathetic to their cause: Kołodziejczak, for instance, founded the agrarian party Agrounia, which combined agrarian protectionism with social democracy, while Krajewski is a member of PSL, a centrist agrarian party. Today, Agrounia acts under the umbrella of Tusk’s Civic Coalition political alliance, while PSL is part of the centrist Third Way alliance that is crucial to Tusk’s governing coalition.

Neither group has been shy in their support for Polish farmers. PSL, whose members have taken up key positions in Tusk’s cabinet, explicitly voiced support for a list of demands put forward by agricultural organisations last year — and that was also supported by Poland’s former governing party. These groups will be critical to building a bridge between Poland’s rural populists and the new government.

While Tusk’s first priority is still to work with the EU on restoring rule of law in Poland (however haphazardly), the last eight years have shown players in the now-ruling coalition that Poles have a clear, uncompromising vision of their political future within the block — and will look out for themselves first and foremost. Tusk has to underscore that he is indeed the leader of Poland and not just an EU proxy in Warsaw, and if his coalition’s moves are any indication, he has chosen agriculture and trade as the area in which to prove exactly that.

It’s an outcome that will have momentous consequences — not just for Poland but for Europe as a whole. Since the PiS came to power in 2015, Poland’s relations with the EU have grown increasingly strained. Over the years, the European Commission has systematically charged Poland with failing to uphold the “rule of law”, as defined by Brussels — for threatening media freedom and judicial independence, not doing enough to tackle systemic corruption, violating LGBT and minority rights, and thwarting the bloc’s immigration policies.

The PiS government, on the other hand, has always contended that these were matters of national sovereignty over which the EU had no say, locking horns with Brussels over what is arguably its most important article of faith: the primacy of EU law over national law.

When Brussels claimed that a new judicial disciplinary body created in 2017 — composed of jurists appointed by Parliament to hear complaints against judges facing misconduct allegations — violated EU law and should be revoked, the Polish government refused to comply. It claimed the demand represented an unacceptable infringement on the country’s national sovereignty. The Polish Constitutional Tribunal upheld the Government’s decision, insisting that national law enjoyed primacy over EU law.

In the eyes of EU officials and pro-EU elites, this, even more than culture-war issues, is what made Poland, along with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, an existential threat. It was, after all, a serious blow to one of the crucial pillars of the bloc’s empire-building project: integration by law — the stealthy hollowing out of national constitutional and legal systems, through which the EU has slowly aligned policies across the bloc regardless of electoral outcomes. As Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, put it at the time: “If this principle is broken, Europe as we know it, as it has been built with the Rome treaties, will cease to exist.”

And this wasn’t all. The PiS also clashed with Brussels and other countries over its opposition to the extension of qualified majority voting, in place of unanimity, to new areas such as foreign policy — seen by integrationists as a way of overcoming the ability of individual countries to block EU initiatives, as well as a precondition for further enlargement.

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Yet what made the PiS hated in Brussels is also what led it to become something of a role model in the eyes of other Eurosceptic and national-conservative parties across the continent. As Nicholas Lokker wrote in a recent article for Foreign Policy, “PiS has actively sought to lead a coalition of populist and far-right political parties across the bloc. Warsaw hosted a meeting of numerous leaders of such parties in 2021. This February, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni proclaimed their determination to push back against a ‘centralist vision’ of Europe.”

Amid such strong rhetoric, what went wrong? For a long time, the PiS’s grip on the country seemed unshakeable, with the party persistently enjoying strong support in the polls. The outbreak of the war in Ukraine seemed poised to strengthen the ruling party even further, not least because it dramatically shifted Europe’s geopolitical balance of power from the West to the East — first and foremost to Poland.

Almost overnight, the country, which has always been staunchly pro-US and pro-Nato, and which already had one of the most formidable armies in Europe before the conflict, went from being the EU’s bête noire to being the tip of its spear in Ukraine and Nato’s de facto logistical hub. “Poland has become our most important partner in continental Europe”, a senior US Army official in Europe claimed in November. All of a sudden, in the eyes of Brussels — and especially Washington — Poland was no longer a threat to democracy but, purportedly, a crucial ally in the struggle against autocracy.

These developments strongly emboldened the country’s geopolitical aspirations: as the biggest and richest nation in Central and Eastern Europe (and the sixth-largest economy in the EU), it has long aspired to a leading role in the central and north-eastern quadrant, capable of counterbalancing both Russia and the Franco-German axis. The conflict gave this project a huge impetus.

Indeed, it seemed inevitable that the PiS would benefit from this — but events took a different turn. The fortunes of the PiS were already waning before the war, due to criticisms over its handling of the pandemic, a hugely controversial ruling by Poland’s constitutional tribunal (stating that abortions as a result of foetal defects were unconstitutional), and rising tensions within the governing camp.

The war in Ukraine further complicated matters for the Government: not only did it lead to sky-high inflation, but as a result of the so-called “solidarity routes” set up by the EU, cheap Ukrainian grain flooded the local market, undercutting prices and angering farmers, among whom the PiS had traditionally enjoyed strong support. Confederation, a Right-wing party created in 2018, weaponised the growing frustration among sectors of Polish society with the country’s support for Ukraine, which included taking in at least 2 million refugees. The Government responded by introducing a unilateral ban on Ukrainian grain — and by dramatically withdrawing military support for Ukraine. But it did little to reverse the trend.

Meanwhile, the real beneficiary of the ruling party’s troubles was its arch-enemy: Donald Tusk. A pro-market, pro-EU liberal-centrist, he was the country’s prime minister from 2007 to 2014, before going on to become the EU’s president and then the president of the centre-right European People’s Party until last year. Throughout his career, he has been a devout servant of the EU’s integrationist, supranationalist project: in 2015, when Greek Left-wing leader Alexis Tsipras clashed with the EU over austerity, Tusk played a crucial role in crushing the Greek government’s revolt and pressuring it to accept a new bailout conditional upon a new round of austerity measures. Then, in 2016, he bitterly opposed Brexit, saying that there was “a special place in hell” for Brexiteers.

It was unsurprising, then, that he became the sworn enemy of the PiS — which has always accused him of being responsible for the 2010 plane crash that killed Polish President and PiS co-founder Lech Kaczyński — and in particular of prime minister Morawiecki. In 2021, Tusk decided to make a political comeback with the launch of Civic Platform. Since then, he has skilfully exploited the ruling party’s growing problems, especially the massive backlash against the new abortion law, leading several mass demonstrations against the Government in June and then again two weeks ago.

His victory represents a seismic change in Poland’s political landscape. Tusk has pledged to resolve the country’s rule-of-law disputes with the EU — which essentially means bringing Poland back under the “soft tyranny” of the EU’s legislation, the so-called acquis communautaire, in exchange for which the EU has promised to unlock €35 billion in post-pandemic funds. He has also pledged to offer greater protection for LGBT and women’s rights, as well as renormalising relations with Ukraine. On the economic front, Tusk will likely pursue a pro-business agenda, probably reversing some of the PiS’s generous welfare policies, while on other issues, such as immigration, he will probably maintain the status quo, even though this is unlikely to defuse the country’s hyper-polarised political landscape.

But the ramifications of Tusk’s victory extend well beyond Poland. The most obvious winner is the EU. Not only will it weaken the Right-populist and Eurosceptic front, but it will also give new lifeblood to the EU’s integrationist project. Tusk’s Civic Coalition has, for instance, pledged to “return to the decision-making group in the EU institutions”, and he has often endorsed the use of qualified majority voting in the past. As Lokker put it: “A fresh approach to Poland’s EU partners by a Civic Coalition-led government would significantly widen the window for further EU integration.”

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Yet there is also a less obvious winner of Sunday’s election: Germany. The PiS was viscerally anti-German. Last August, for example, Polish foreign minister Zbigniew Rau likened “Russian imperialism” to “imperial practices within the EU”, particularly in Germany; the Polish deputy PM had previously accused Germany of trying to turn the EU into a federal “German fourth Reich”.

Under Tusk, by contrast, Poland is less likely to compete with Germany for leadership of Nato, making it easier for Germany to enact its plan of “becoming the guarantor of European security” — in other words, managing Nato on behalf of Washington, in exchange for being allowed to re-establish a position of economic leadership within the EU. To further drive the message home, a member of the German parliament’s EU committee wrote on Sunday: “Within the Nato framework, the message should be: Germany feels responsible for Poland’s security!”

There is, however, just one problem for pro-EU elites in Germany and elsewhere: while the Right-populist threat might be declining in the East, as Poland’s election attests, it is growing in the West — especially in Germany — largely due to the EU’s prioritisation of US-driven foreign policy diktats over the economic interests of member states. Attempts to use the Polish results to justify a new integrationist power grab by the EU will only embolden anti-EU forces. Brussels might be celebrating for now — but after the party, comes the hangover.

An earlier version of this article did not properly attribute quotations to Nicholas Lokker. This has been corrected.

Since the Russian invasion began, Poland has been one of Ukraine’s most assertive military, financial and diplomatic supporters. The Polish people have also welcomed fleeing Ukrainians into their homes with open arms. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that the two countries had always been the closest of allies.

But Ukraine couldn’t always count on Poland. For much of their history, the two nations have harboured deep resentment against each other. And Ukraine has, at times, seen Poland as just as much of an antagonist as Russia. Centuries of mistrust between the two, starting with a Ukrainian Cossack rebellion against Polish authority back in the 17th century, culminated in Poland’s forced deportation of 150,000 Ukrainians and related ethnic minorities from its from Poland’s southeastern borderlands in 1947 — an act that the post-Cold War Polish government has formally condemned.

And for their part, the Poles are yet to forgive the Ukrainians for the grisly Volhynia massacres of 1943-1945, when the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a far-Right paramilitary, killed as many as 100,000 Poles — many of them women and children — in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. These places today lie in western Ukraine, but were part of Poland before the Second World War. The killing spree was bound up with a Ukrainian nationalist campaign to establish an independent Ukrainian state and prevent post-war Poland taking back its former territory.

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The two nations still don’t see eye-to-eye on the issue: while the Ukrainians tend to refer to the massacres as a “tragedy”, the Polish talk about the Volhynia “genocide” or “slaughter”. One reason Ukrainians are reluctant to look too closely at the matter is that the UPA, the organisation responsible for the massacres, was founded by followers of Stepan Bandera — one of the revered, if controversial, fathers of Ukrainian nationalism. He is lionised by many Ukrainians today — though certainly not all — because of his stalwart, uncompromising fight against the Soviet Union. Since Russia’s invasion last year, Ukrainian public figures have been especially nervous of sullying his legacy, as the country is in need of historical symbols to rally around. According to one poll, Bandera is now viewed favourably by 74% of Ukrainians.

But Poland wants to present a united front with Ukraine against Russia. Wary of vindicating Putin’s dehumanising depiction of Ukraine as a nation of murderous fascists, it has called for “reconciliation and forgiveness” over the Volhynia killings. Zelenskyy, too, has shown goodwill. And so, earlier this month, he joined Duda in honouring Polish victims on the 80th anniversary of the massacre’s start. He has also promised to exhume the bodies of Polish victims from mass graves on Ukrainian territory so that they can be given proper burials — a courtesy long demanded by Poland.

It is in Ukraine’s interests to settle the issue. By coming to terms with the UPA atrocities in Volhynia, Ukraine would be able to craft a more nuanced view of its history and national identity, which would better suit its current pluralistic, democratic character than the narrow, authoritarian and racialised vision of Bandera. This in turn will make it harder for Russia to distort Ukrainian history and demonise its national heritage, depriving Putin of a key weapon in his fight against Ukraine.

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Yet coming to terms with the massacre won’t be easy. Ukraine’s government has never denied the killings took place; the trouble is in the detail and framing. Some Ukrainian officials have used reprisals by Polish self-defence units at the time to suggest that the massacres were the result of a tit-for-tat territorial dispute — even though far fewer Ukrainians, between 10,000 and 20,000 civilians and UPA militants, were killed by Poles in these attacks. A common phrase used by Ukrainian public figures is “We forgive and ask for forgiveness”, which sounds nice, but creates a sense of equal and mutual wrongdoing.

Even more concerning are the Ukrainian scholars who cast doubt on how closely involved the UPA leadership was in orchestrating the killings. And here is the heart of the problem: for many Ukrainians, the UPA and its parent organisation, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), played a crucial role in Ukraine’s struggle for independence — and so cannot simply be erased from the national narrative. Because Ukrainians have historically viewed themselves exclusively as victims of foreign domination, implicating the UPA and OUN in an arguably genocidal campaign would challenge central elements of their self-image, and would complicate their perception of figures such Bandera as righteous rebels against oppression.

The Volhynia massacres took place at a desperate juncture in Ukrainian’s journey towards freedom. At the end of the First World War, Ukrainians twice attempted to establish independent states on the territory of modern Ukraine. However, by 1921, both efforts had failed, and Ukrainians were once again a subjugated people, split between the USSR and Poland. While Ukrainian identity was encouraged for a time in Soviet-annexed Ukraine, by the Thirties, Stalin’s collectivisation policies had led to the devastating, man-made Holodomor famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. In the inter-war Second Polish Republic, Ukrainian desires for autonomy were tolerated to varying degrees depending on who was in charge, but by and large Ukrainians were treated as second-class citizens.

In response to both the famine in the communist USSR and the oppressive Polish state, certain Ukrainian nationalists adopted an increasingly militant far-Right ideology. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later the USSR, these Ukrainian nationalists, including Bandera, joined forces with the Germans, believing that they had finally found their ticket to independence. However, when Bandera and the OUN declared an independent Ukrainian state in 1941 under German auspices, he and other OUN leaders were arrested by occupying Nazi authorities and their hopes were dashed yet again. The UPA and local OUN commanders loyal to Bandera turned against the Germans, but remained convinced that the only way to bring about the ethnically-pure Ukrainian state they envisioned would be to act against the local Polish population while the German occupiers were still in charge — leading them to instigate the Volhynia massacres in 1943.

This has given Russia plenty of fodder for propaganda. The Kremlin has tried to paint Bandera as a hardened Nazi for years in order to brand modern Ukraine as a fascist state — in 2021, Putin baselessly claimed Bandera’s “followers” in Ukraine were making plans to massacre Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, and called Ukrainians “neo-Nazis and Banderites” shortly after touching off his invasion last year. Yet Moscow has conveniently ignored the fact that the modern Ukrainian state that emerged in 1991 was entirely unaffiliated with the visions of Bandera, the OUN and the UPA, and that Bandera was simply one of many Ukrainian independence fighters who didn’t all share the same ideology.

Resolving a decades-old historical dispute with a country it now considers one of its closest allies feels like an issue of only passing importance while Ukraine is under attack. But it is precisely because of the Russian invasion that it should be confronted. The war has catalysed a dramatic renaissance of Ukrainian culture and identity as Ukrainians demonstrated that theirs is an independent nation worth dying for, creating the perfect opportunity for them to build a more holistic and critical perspective on the early 20th-century nationalism that helped to forge their country.

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There are indications Ukraine is keen to take up the challenge. This May, the head of Ukraine’s parliament said during a speech to Poland’s parliament that Ukraine “will work with you, dear Polish friends, accepting the truth no matter how ruthless it may be”. To make a statement like this about such a bitter period of ethnic violence is practically unheard of in Eastern Europe. From the Balkans to the Caucasus, issues like these tend to be left to fester into simmering ethnic hatreds — but Poland and Ukraine are showing that it is possible to some extent to move on.

Every day, Ukraine finds new war heroes to worship: from soldiers dying on the front line to grandmothers making Molotov cocktails. With this new generation of freedom fighters, the need to venerate divisive 20th-century nationalists such as Bandera may well diminish, allowing Ukraine and Poland to finally put their differences behind them and ensure that their friendship will stand the test of time.

But a leopard never changes its spots. In an attempt to capitalise on all this good will, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda signed a bill into law last week that will establish a commission to root out Kremlin influence in Polish politics. This may sound admirable, except for the fact that there is very little Kremlin meddling to eliminate. Unlike in countries such as Moldova, Hungary or Georgia, Poland’s political landscape is almost entirely united in its opposition to Russia. Far from cracking down on Russian saboteurs, the law is little more than a power play meant to sideline Duda’s political rivals.

Unfortunately for Duda’s party, the world has seen through its ruse. So have the Polish people. Nearly 61% of Poles reportedly disapprove of the commission, according to a recent survey, and on Sunday, an estimated half a million Poles marched through Warsaw in one of the nation’s largest demonstrations since the fall of communism.

They are right to be worried. The ruling party and its allies have made no secret of the fact that they intend to use the commission to target their political opponents. One MP from the Law and Justice’s coalition has admitted that he hoped the commission’s work would put Donald Tusk, the leader of the Polish political opposition, in front of the State Tribunal. Tusk has been targeted by the Law and Justice Party for years for signing a gas deal with Russia in 2010 during his tenure as prime minister.

We’ve seen this type of political persecution before: during the Cold War, US Senator Joseph McCarthy, along with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), ruined the careers of hundreds of Americans whom they smeared as communist sympathisers without having to levy a single criminal charge against them.

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Today, Poland’s commission, as originally proposed, will not even feign transparency. It will be able to carry out its deliberations in secrecy and request access to classified materials from an enormous swathe of the Polish government. The members of the commission will be appointed by the Sejm, the Polish parliament in which the Law and Justice Party’s coalition holds power, and they will be immune from future culpability for their activities as part of the commission. It will also deploy a rather vague definition of what constitutes Russian influence, which could open the door for individuals to be found guilty by association. Perhaps most importantly, its rulings and proceedings will take place without any real judicial oversight, and its final report will likely be handed down in September of this year — less than two months before Poland’s parliamentary elections.

Last Friday, in response to condemnations from the US, the European Union, the Polish opposition and various legal experts, Duda backtracked slightly. He proposed amendments that would, among other things, ban parliamentarians from serving directly on the commission and, crucially, would withdraw a provision allowing the commission to ban alleged offenders from public office for up to 10 years. Yet even without this power, the commission will still wield significant influence over Polish politics and will almost certainly colour the autumn elections.

This commission is only the latest iteration of the Law and Justice Party’s long-running tendency to see foreign plots at every turn. Late last month, the party’s leader and the de facto most powerful man in Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński, warned that an opposition victory in the autumn elections would mean the “end of Poland”, and that foreign interlopers were trying to undermine Poland’s success. Not long after, he called a critical journalist a “representative of the Kremlin” for asking whether he continued to trust his defence minister in the wake of a national security crisis. The incident was particularly concerning given that, a few days later, the Deputy Minister of Defence Wojciech Skurkiewicz himself stated that certain journalists should stand before the commission as well. Given that the party has already cleansed state-funded news outlets of dissenting points of view and populated them with loyal media executives since their rise to power in 2015, such rhetoric is not surprising.

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Kaczyński’s tactics are hardly new either. This is a man who has justified his party’s overhaul of Poland’s judicial system by alleging the widespread, lingering influence of former communists, implicitly with Russian sympathies — an idea that has animated his political activities since the early Nineties. But Kaczyński’s most infamous conspiracy theory concerns the horrific plane crash near Smolensk, Russia, in 2010 that killed his twin brother, who was Poland’s president at the time. The tragedy was ultimately attributed to pilot error and unusually foggy weather, and despite suspicions, investigation after investigation failed to find any signs of foul play. Nevertheless, this did not stop Kaczyński and the Law and Justice Party from asserting that the crash was an assassination ordered by Vladimir Putin, and went as far as to state that Tusk, who was prime minister at the time, had orchestrated its cover-up — a claim the party continues to make to this day.

With a history like this, it is hard to expect the Law and Justice Party’s commission to operate without bias when it comes to tackling Russian influence. Of course, Poland is not entirely free of Kremlin influence. Russian cyberattacks have plagued the country since last year, and alleged Kremlin agents have been arrested by Polish security services on various occasions. While the vast majority of Poles oppose Russia, there are several fringe far-Right parties who are sympathetic. But by targeting the Law and Justice Party’s mainstream opponents, the commission will be looking in all the wrong places.

Duda’s amendments last week were simply not enough. Only by abandoning the commission altogether will the Law and Justice Party step back from the brink of neo-McCarthyite autocracy, allowing it to focus on Poland’s true enemies abroad. Yet having built their brand on exactly these sort of witch hunts for years, reflexes like these may not be easy to discard — after all, old habits are always hard to break.

A political blame game has since erupted in Poland. Both Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Defence Minister Mariusz Błaszczak have denied being aware of the incident when it took place, with the latter implying that members of the Polish armed forces had obfuscated it in official reports at the time — a claim which seems unlikely.

However, regardless of who is to blame, the episode reveals a state hierarchy vastly underprepared to protect Poland, and by extension the rest of Nato, from Russian threats. Not only did a missile manage to fly over more than half the country, including potentially over its capital Warsaw, without being shot down, but the Polish government chose to keep emergency services in the dark rather than risking attracting media attention, despite the threat to civilian lives. After it landed, authorities allegedly called off the search without locating the missile, reportedly refusing to widen it for similar reasons — even though no one at that time knew what sort of payload the Kh-55 had been carrying. It’s a wonder no one was hurt.

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The fact that the missile didn’t hit any civilian infrastructure appears to have been a stroke of luck. Some commentators in the Polish media have noted that, had it continued on its course, the missile could have hit a key LNG terminal near Poland’s border with Germany, which would have endangered the region’s energy security. And if the missile’s angle of flight had been just slightly different, we may instead have witnessed an assault on Poland’s eighth-largest city, which would have seen civilian casualties and potentially the invocation of Nato’s Article 5 against Russia.

“This was a significantly more serious incident than anything that had happened previously,” Marek Świerczyński, the head of the security desk at the Polish research institution Polityka Insight, told me. “I imagine that all the decision-makers and military leaders who knew about this were sweating from head to toe, and were praying to all the gods they knew that this wasn’t an attack, that this wasn’t war.”

The Polish government has never revealed whether contact with the Russian side ever took place, and although it’s clear in hindsight that the strike was likely a mistake, there’s no knowing if Poland’s leaders were aware of this on 16 December. With this in mind, the Polish government’s lack of communication and apparent predisposition to hiding facts to save face presents a grave risk not only for Poland’s security, but for Nato’s as well. Although we do not know the full facts of the case, and possibly never will, the strike appears to have exposed vital gaps in the bloc’s security and Poland’s crisis management readiness — gaps that could be exploited by Russia.

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What we do know is this: on 16 December, during a Russian missile barrage on targets across Ukraine, the Ukrainians alerted the Polish military to a potential rocket moving towards the Polish border, likely originating over Belarus. The Poles scrambled fighter jets to track the missile. Soon enough, they lost it from their radar systems, as the missile was apparently only in the air over Poland for about half an hour. A single local police patrol was dispatched to search for the missile on the ground, and helicopters also reportedly searched from the air. Both gave up after failing to locate anything out of the ordinary, even though it remained possible that an unexploded ordinance, potentially of a nuclear variety, remained somewhere in the area.

Speculation has swirled about why a missile was able to fly for such a long distance over Nato territory without being neutralised. According to some analysts, Poland’s armed forces are not equipped for continuous tracking of low-flying airborne objects when in a peacetime posture, and it would have been nearly impossible for the jets to catch up with the missile given its head start. But Poland’s missile systems, deployed along the border and around Warsaw, were not activated to meet the threat either. Poland has purchased billions of dollars’ worth of air defence systems in the past year, and already has several US-made Patriot batteries at its disposal. According to Świerczyński, ground-based air defence systems are historically quite poor at engaging targets like this one without a dense array of radar systems at their disposal. But while Poland is still in the process of dramatically upgrading its armed forces, the impression that the nation is unable to secure its airspace with its current capabilities, outside of wartime, is deeply concerning.

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There is an even more pressing problem: that political concerns were prioritised over the security of Polish citizens. According to Błaszczak, American fighter jets were dispatched along with Polish ones on 16 December. This would have necessitated communication with US allies, making it highly improbable that the defence minister wouldn’t have been made aware of the incident at the time. Nato’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg appeared to confirm that such communication took place this week, making it all the more perplexing that neither Polish nor Nato authorities seemed particularly interested in locating the potentially lethal rocket.

In conversations with Stoltenberg on Monday, Polish President Andrzej Duda implicitly admitted that the system had failed, calling in particular for revised Nato search procedures in such situations. It remains to be seen whether these revisions would extend to the vital procedures that should have taken place in the minutes after the missile was first detected and before it landed.

“The most difficult and important issue is not whether some radar detected something, or if some ground-based air defence system was ready to shoot it down,” Świerczyński said, “but if on the side of Nato and Poland there was clarity on whether this was a mistake or whether this was an attack.” According to the recent Discord leaks about the war in Ukraine, the US has considerable intelligence about Moscow’s moves in the theatre of war. But even so, it would be difficult to imagine that the Americans had advance knowledge about whether this missile had been dispatched toward Poland intentionally — let alone about its payload. Therefore, it was likely that there was no such clarity about the nature of the Kh-55, making the Polish government’s lacklustre response seem all the more irresponsible.

That Poland’s government has learned so few lessons from November’s rocket incident is something that bodes ill not just for Poland, but for many Nato states that have tacitly started to rely on it as a “linchpin of regional security”. Poland has become particularly crucial to guaranteeing the security of natural gas flowing from Norway through pipelines in the Baltic Sea, and to the security of the neighbouring Baltic states. With such growing regional responsibilities, Poland increasingly has little room for error in the security sphere.

We can only hope that this incident serves as a wake-up call for Polish and Nato leaders and paves the way for greater transparency. Poland’s politicians must realise they cannot afford to sacrifice national security for the sake of their political careers. After all, it was a fortunate accident that this Kh-55 failed to cause any real damage or endanger any lives — but next time, we may not be so lucky.

Very simply, the “Europe” Macron speaks of no longer exists, if it ever did. On paper, almost the entire continent is united under one supranational flag — that of the European Union. But that is more fractured than ever. On top of the economic and cultural divides that have always plagued the bloc, the war in Ukraine has caused a massive fault line to re-emerge along the borders of the Iron Curtain. The East-West divide is back with a vengeance.

This was underscored by the reaction to Macron’s remarks. On the one hand, Charles Michel, the Belgian President of the European Council, implied that the French president’s position reflects the views of several Western European leaders, including in Germany. On the other, Mateusz Morawiecki, the prime minister of Poland, spoke for most Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries when he stated: “The alliance with the United States is the absolute foundation of our security… Instead of building strategic autonomy from the US, I propose a strategic partnership with the US.” This isn’t a tactical or even a strategic disagreement; these are two existentially dichotomous visions.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. The East-West divide has been one of Europe’s defining geographical and political paradigms for centuries. The end of the Cold War and, then, the CEE countries’ accession to the EU just over a decade later were both heralded as the post-Communist countries’ much-awaited “return to Europe”. It was widely believed that the EU’s universalist project would smooth out any major social and cultural differences between Western and Central-Eastern Europe — meaning that the latter would slowly become more like the former. Such a hubristic (and arguably imperialistic) project was bound to fail; indeed, tensions and contradictions quickly became apparent between the two Europes.

One early topic of disagreement was, inevitably, Russia. Since they emerged from Soviet occupation, several CEE states, especially those on or close to the border with Russia, have remained suspicious of Moscow’s geostrategic intentions. By contrast, Western European nations, with Germany at the forefront, boosted economic ties with Russia, especially in the field of energy. Some even envisaged building an integrated Eurasian geopolitical bloc theoretically stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok. From a Central-Eastern European perspective this might have seemed crazy, but from a Western European perspective it made perfect sense, given the strong historical, cultural and even ideological ties (especially in those countries with once-powerful Communist parties) between Western Europe and Russia.

Over the years, America amplified these divisions. In 2003, for example, on the eve of the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld famously scorned France and Germany as the “old Europe”, which he contrasted with the vitality of the “new Europe” — the CEE states that were soon after included in Nato. “The centre of gravity is shifting to the East,” he said.

Several CEE countries — Poland in particular, for obvious reasons — also had historic grievances against Germany, and serious misgivings about the emergence of a potential Russo-German axis. This is why the Nord Stream project was almost unanimously opposed by CEE states. The East’s integration into the German value chain, considered one of the EU’s success stories, reinforced the region’s ambivalent relationship with Germany: while Central-Eastern Europe benefited from being part of Germany’s powerful “assembly chain”, it also reignited fears of EU-German economic imperialism (in this respect, many CEE countries were smart enough not to join the eurozone).

The most pronounced East-West cleavages, however, emerged along cultural lines, rather than economic or geopolitical ones. In 1993, Samuel Huntington was the first to predict that the Iron Curtain, which had politically and ideologically divided Europe for half a century, would be replaced by “the Velvet Curtain” of culture. Western Europe, he wrote, has been predominantly Catholic, Protestant, and Anglican, while Eastern Europe has been predominantly Orthodox — and this has led to the emergence of very different social values. Where Western Europe developed a more individualistic and secular culture that values “liberal” rights and freedoms, Eastern Europe has historically had a more collectivist and family-oriented culture, with a greater emphasis on family, community, social relationships and religion. Following the Cold War, the CEE states strove to be more politically and socially aligned with the West. But key differences remained on issues such as immigration, abortion and gay rights, as well as over national sovereignty.

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In recent years, the EU’s aggressive attempts to impose its integrationist and socially progressive values across Central and Eastern Europe have led to an increasingly assertive pushback. The result has been a souring of EU-CEE relations, and increased coordination among CEE states — such as with the Visegrád Group and the Three Seas Initiative — to boost their autonomy.

Until recently, the turn towards “illiberal” or “post-liberal” democracy in various CEE countries — most notably Hungary and Poland — was described as one of the greatest threats to the EU, with those nations branded as the bloc’s bêtes noires. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed this. Overnight, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania became the EU’s direct border with a war zone. The invasion also enhanced the geostrategic importance of countries that border Russia or Russian-controlled Belarus (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland), as well as those which overlook the strategically crucial Northern Sea Route (Norway and Sweden). In other words, the conflict has dramatically shifted Europe’s geopolitical balance of power from the West to the East (and partly to the North). These countries have been receiving unprecedented international attention, funding and, most important, defence equipment.

The number of US soldiers in Central-Eastern Europe, for instance, has more than doubled to over 14,000. Most of them — around 10,000 — are in Poland, which is also the country that has most benefited from these developments. As the biggest and richest nation in the CEE (and the sixth-largest economy in the EU), it has long aspired to a leading role in the central and north-eastern quadrant, capable of counterbalancing both Russia and the Franco-German axis. The conflict has given this project a huge impetus.

Poland, which has always been staunchly pro-US and pro-Nato, already had one of the most formidable armies in Europe before the conflict. And in the past year, it has launched a massive rearmament plan to build a 300,000-strong high-tech army and transform the country into Europe’s military superpower. Crucially, this strategy is aimed at Germany (and the EU) as much as it is at Russia: last August, Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau likened “Russian imperialism” to “imperial practices within the EU”, particularly in Germany.

Meanwhile, Poland has welcomed millions of Ukrainian refugees and given Ukraine hundreds of tanks and other weapons systems (including some MiG-29 fighter jets). Following America’s decision to make Poland a permanent base for the US Army’s V Corps, which commands the eastern flank’s US land forces, the country has, in effect, become the logistical hub of Nato’s war efforts in Ukraine. As a result, Poland’s self-perception as an aspiring regional power is also becoming more pronounced. Last month, the Polish Ambassador to France suggested that Poland might “enter the conflict” if necessary. And there is even a lively debate in Poland as to whether it should merge with Ukraine into a federal or confederal state.

Poland’s ambition clearly aligns with America’s aim to shift Europe’s balance of power towards the “new Europe”, which explains why the US has been quick to lend it considerable support, even at the cost of sowing further divisions on the continent. “Poland has become our most important partner in continental Europe,” a senior US Army official in Europe told Politico. Significantly, after visiting Ukraine last month, Biden made only one other additional stop on his European trip: Warsaw.

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Whether this will translate into a long-term shift in political power to the East will also depend on economic dynamics. Western Europe continues to hold primacy on this front, but its economies, particularly Germany’s, have suffered a serious blow as a result of the conflict and related sanctions. Much will hang on whether the re-militarisation of Europe becomes a permanent feature in the coming years, in which case the CEE and Baltic countries — which are currently investing the most in their defence and technological sectors — would benefit economically as well, acquiring a central role in the EU’s long-term defence industrial policy.

Another factor will be the growing rifts caused by the conflict in the CEE. Hungary, formerly Poland’s closest ally in the Visegrád Group, has refused to send weapons to Ukraine, and has maintained close economic ties with Moscow, including continuing to import Russian energy on favourable terms. Viktor Orbán has explicitly sided with Macron on the question of Euro-American relations. “At present, the EU is uncritically adopting the US position wholesale, with US interests simply being presented as European interests,” Orbán said last October. “This is precisely why today Europe is one of the losers in this war and the US is one of the winners.”

None of this, however, significantly alters the fact that the East-West divide in Europe is greater than it has been for decades — and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Ultimately, Western Europe has every interest in reducing its dependency on the US and Nato, reaching a diplomatic solution to the conflict and, as Macron argued, re-normalising security and economic relations with Russia. Central and Eastern Europe, on other hand, has every reason to be fearful of Russia and to favour tighter relations with the US and Nato.

It is, therefore, hard to see how the interests and aspirations of the two sub-blocs could ever be reconciled, especially in the context of EU politics. If countries such as France are serious about “strategic autonomy”, it appears they will have to go it alone.

After all, who doesn’t love beavers? As well as providing a furry flood-defence, beavers are lauded as “ecosystem engineers” for their stimulation of biodiversity. Their fans range from Michael Gove — who, as Environment Secretary, splurged £20,000 on a trial to reintroduce the rodents to the River Otter — to the residents of Pickering, in Yorkshire, whose homes were saved from flooding by an upstream beaver dam slowing excess water. Reassuringly, the Rewilding Britain charity informs us: “Beavers are vegan and don’t eat fish or other animals.”

That is the final straw. Beavermania needs a cold shower of reality. The “rewilding superstar” is herbivorous; veganism is a human philosophical choice. And reintroducing them comes with negatives, for the environment and for people. Indeed, their reintroduction is proof of the fallacy of “rewilding” as a conservation concept. A very expensive fallacy. Michael Gove’s £20,000 is but a drop in the river when it comes to the cost of beaver reintroduction. The Scottish Beaver Trial of 2009-14, which tested the waters for their reintroduction north of the border, cost £2 million in admin alone: a sum that is the stuff of dreams for most conservation charities. And then there is the infrastructure. The standard model of beaver re-introduction is to initially fence the “wild” animals in enclosures of about two hectares. Since beavers both burrow and climb, the fencing has to be heavy duty stuff: installation, per beaver introduction, easily costs £30,000.

Beavers also gnaw trees. An adult beaver can bring down a 10-inch-wide tree in under an hour; single beavers have been known to fell 200 trees a year. We are normally, if you remember, urged to plant trees, for the sake of the environment. But trees also have financial worth: in the upper Danube region of Germany, beavers have caused £5 million of damage. Alas, beavers are indiscriminate lumberjacks, so valuable timber requires guards, or deterrent slime. These things, too, cost money.

Beavers chop down the trees, of course, in order to build dams. And as any child who has ever played in a ditch or stream will explain, impede flowing water and you get flooding behind the impediment. When a dam built by humans floods a village, we protest. But when a beavers’ dam causes flooding, we call it a biodiverse wetland paradise. Yet it is no less destructive, of both infrastructure and agricultural land. The evidence for this can be found anywhere beavers have been reintroduced. The Scottish Beaver Trial at Knapdale paid out £38,000 to cover flood damage caused by a single colony of beavers to a mere 200 metres of road. To compensate farmers for loss of crops on flooded farmland, plus the beavers’ hearty liking for farmed veg, the German state of Bavaria coughs up €450,000 annually, while the Polish government paid out over €4 million in 2017 alone. As well as building their dams, beavers burrow into riverbanks, for up to 100 metres, destabilising them. The Polish Interior Ministry partly blamed the devastating floods of 2010 on the country’s then 70,000 beavers, stating: “The greatest enemy of the flood defences is an animal called the beaver.”

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Unsurprisingly, “initial societal enthusiasm” for beaver reintroductions in Poland, which commenced in 1975, is washing away, to be replaced with “pointing out the problems connected with the phenomenon”. Here is a lesson for the UK: the more beavers we have, the more potential there is for human-beaver conflict. Both Defra and the Scottish government already operate “beaver mitigation schemes”; the latter’s, after acknowledging that “not all beaver activity is helpful in every situation”, offers to, among other things, “provide free expert advice on how to manage beaver activity” and “trial new technology to track beaver activity to minimise the burden on land managers”. The dream and the goal of rewilding, according to Rewilding Britain, is “restoring ecosystems to the point where nature can take care of itself”, yet beavers in Scotland, fantastically, actually require state management. So much for “rewilding”.

And when the management fails, the beavers are relocated or killed. In Scotland, support for the species’s expansion is already declining: in 2021, 90 beavers were culled, and 120 captured, to prevent serious damage to agriculture. Those who advocate uncontrolled beaver reintroduction are as culpable of the killings as the person pulling the trigger: it is well-known that wherever you have large beaver populations, and anything more than a negligible human population, the former end up being culled. The beaver population of Poland is 3.2 per 10 km²; in 2019, permits were issued for the reduction of about 6% of that population, a sum of 8,391 beavers. Beaver culling and relocating in Scotland, the area with the lowest human population density, has already reached over 10%. If rewilding can’t happen in Scotland, it can’t happen anywhere in the UK.

But maybe beavers are worth all this inconvenience, and all the millions? Maybe their heralded “natural flood-prevention” and ecosystem engineering is a win, for the public purse and the environment? On the possibility of beavers being major mitigators of flooding in Britain, the mathematicians of Leeds University are barely unable to contain their mirth:

“even a 10% flood reduction of the FEV [Flood Excess Volume] using beaver colonies and beaver dams, requires hundreds of such colonies per river catchment… serious flood mitigation by massive introduction of beaver colonies is completely unrealistic, in stark contrast to statements made in scientific literature and in the media.”

To this observation, one must add another: when beavers build dams on streams, they effectively replace one habitat — that of fast moving water — with another, that of ponds and wetland. Arguments rage as to whether this beaver eco-engineering is good or bad for other species. As Beavermaniacs frequently remind us, the wetlands created by the dams of Castor fiber are favourable to creatures ranging from frog to kingfisher. But conservationists concerned about our dwindling, fragile numbers of wild trout and salmon — now at their lowest levels since records began and “reaching crisis point” — have gnawing fears about beaver dams, which are barriers to piscatorial migration.

Each side, almost daily, advances a scientific report proving their case. The only safe conclusion is that of The Earth Science Review: “Effective management of beaver impacts on fish may simply come down to careful consideration of individual dam and site characteristics… and the characteristics of the fish species being considered.” In plain English: “It depends on the stream, on the dam.” Since beavers cannot be relied upon to determine whether their settlement on a stream is good or bad for the neighbourhood fish, humans will have to. Again: so much for rewilding.

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Besides, whether we have beavers and whether we have wetlands are separate questions. There exists an animal even better at dam-making than Castor fiber. It is called Homo sapiens sapiens. Consider the branch of low-cost conservation called “beaver dam mimicry”, whereby dams are built out of rocks or posts. Last time I did it, it was a morning’s work with a digger. Want to emulate the beavers’ tree-felling? Use a chainsaw. You don’t need beavers to create wetland, or a tree-felled riverbank. You need a couple of hundred quid’s worth of kit. Also, human-constructed dams can be fabricated with built-in access for migratory fish, so the salmon win too. Faux-beaver dams, now commonplace in the US, show “promise in achieving a range of conservation goals, including increasing the retention of water and sediment, helping maintain late season flows, and improving stream and streamside habitat quality”. So, the benefits of beaver without the negatives of beaver.

In a de-natured countryside, it is pertinent to ask whether the greater good of the environment is really served by channelling so much conservation money into one species. Plenty of fauna and flora are extinct or locally extinct — including the hare, the corncrake, the ghost orchid. Any of them might appreciate some of the cash thrown at Castor fiber. Rabbit, like beavers, are “eco-system engineers”. Their numbers decreased 83% in Scotland between 1996 and 2018. Where is the fuss on their behalf? Is it lacking because bunnies don’t satisfy the rewilders’ romantic fantasies of the return of the wildwood?

Yes, beavers are engaging ambassadors for nature — no small matter — and yes, they have value as tourist attractions. But only for now, while their numbers are limited. When our countryside and towns heave with beavers, they will lose their appeal. When they cause the environment more problems than they solve, we will regret idealising them. It’s time to press pause on beaver reintroduction. Before they become a damn costly pest.

Since the first day of the invasion, Poland’s support for Ukraine has been unwavering. It has sent significant amounts of military equipment, including dozens of tanks, and its army is training Ukrainian soldiers to use 14 Leopard-2 tanks as quickly as possible. On the diplomatic front, it never ceases to beat the drum for its besieged neighbour. After all, Poland has an existential interest in thwarting Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions, especially with Russian troops looming across the border in Belarus.

To establish its authority at the heart of Europe, it plans to amass the largest land army in the Continent, with 300,000 troops, and has just announced a hike in defence spending from 2.4% to 5% of GDP to facilitate it. Already, it has welcomed more than 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees, more than any other European country.

Warsaw also appears to be forging a regional alliance of Nato nations in Eastern Europe. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the “Bucharest Nine”, a group that formed after the Russia’s annexation of Crimea, are united by a traumatic history of Soviet Russian dominance and occupation. On Duda’s initiative, Biden will meet with the group, which is pushing for more Nato resources to be moved to its Eastern flank.

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Balkans expert Timothy Less calls this the “new Warsaw Pact”, which rather than defending Russia’s interests, seeks to protect central and Eastern Europe from the Russians. For Less, this is a strategy that echoes the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth born in the late Middle Ages, as well as the Intermarium, a fanciful plan by Polish leader Józef Piłsudski to form a superstate from the Baltic to the Black Sea after the First World War. Behind each of these alliances was a fear of bullying neighbours over the centuries — Prussia, the German Reich, Austria-Hungary and, of course, Russia.

Poland’s Eastern European alliance, according to Less, “would marginalise France and Germany, threaten the predominant position of the EU in Europe and galvanise its seeming slow-motion decline”. It’s a vision that will appeal to Eurosceptics across the Continent: a new era in which the US gradually moves its military resources from Germany to Poland, a growing hub of power and influence.

Alas, the tale of Franco-German decline is almost as old as the EU. While Poland might have impressive military ambitions, its politics is still riddled with contradictions. Its hardline nationalism comes across as immature and foolish, as seen in its provocative games with its largest trading partner, Germany, and the entity that has allowed it to flourish, the EU.

Since the Law and Justice party (PiS) came to power in 2015, it’s never missed a chance to vilify Germany. When a popular German tabloid, Fakt, reported that Duda had pardoned a convicted child abuser in 2020, the Polish President accused its owner Axel Springer of meddling in Polish elections.

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Other criticism is entirely justifiable: Poland points to decades of Germany cosying up to Russia, as symbolised by the now-destroyed Nord Stream pipelines, which deliberately circumvented Poland and Ukraine, and delivered Germany with an endless supply of cheap Siberian natural gas. But let’s not forget that, until recently, Poland itself was also dependent on Russian hydrocarbons.

Poland is too proud to admit Germany’s role in its economic success story. Its politicians may rant about the EU being a German “Fourth Reich”, but Poland’s last 20 years of prosperity are largely thanks to German growth. German GDP per capita is more than twice as high as Poland’s, with the latter acting as a relatively cheap workshop for German industrial firms within the EU free-trade area. Annual exports to Germany, at around €70 billion, are five times higher than to any other country.

Yet trash-talking Germany seems to be a necessary ingredient in the PiS’ grip on power. The latest affront came in the form of Poland’s demand for Second World War reparations. The price tag: €1.3 trillion. In October, Poland sent the bill to Germany, in the form of a diplomatic note. Of course, Poland has no legal ground to stand on: it waived its claims to reparations in 1953. But the PiS, which knows this full well, hopes to exploit the narrative of Polish victimhood ahead of parliamentary elections this autumn. It doesn’t exactly give the impression of a grown-up country taking on a new leadership role in Europe. Nor does the fact that, when the German defence minister Boris Pistorius visited Poland earlier this month to discuss weapons shipments for Ukraine, his Polish counterpart Mariusz Błaszczak refused to appear in public with him. Apparently, for a PiS politician, there’s nothing more cringe than a photo with a German.

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Then there is Poland’s equally fraught relationship with the European Union. Poland is still by far the greatest net recipient of EU funding. While Germany contributed €21 billion to the EU budget in 2021, Poland received €12.9 billion, more than any other state. How does it show its gratitude? With its middle finger.

The current showdown between the European Commission and Poland is a case in point. The Commission is withholding €36 billion in post-pandemic recovery funds until the Polish government implements specific reforms of its judicial system that will nominally bring Poland back in line with EU law. In recent years, Poland has granted the executive branch increasing control over the courts, ostensibly to purge the courts of old communist-era judges.

A €36 billion cash injection would be helpful in the run up to an election. That’s why the lower house of parliament, the Sejm, approved a step to reintroduce a degree of independence to disciplinary procedures against judges, in the hope that it would be just enough to placate the EU. But President Duda refused to sign the legislation. Instead, he asked the Constitutional Tribunal to scrutinise it for its constitutionality. That court itself is considered to be under PiS control, one of the EU’s complaints.

For now, PiS is leading the polls. But its position is less than secure. Civic Platform, an opposition party led by pro-European former prime minister Donald Tusk, is nibbling at its heels and could assemble a sizeable coalition. Perhaps this is why the government is resorting to ever-more dubious tactics, such as increasing the number of polling stations in villages — an obvious ploy to attract more votes from older, more conservative rural voters.

Poland, then, may be keen to pose as the compassionate and brave saviour of Ukraine, but it remains stuck in the past, with an unhealthy obsession with provoking Germany and the EU, although it owes much of its prosperity to them both. As Piotr Buras of the European Council for Foreign Relations Warsaw office, speaking on German TV, said: “It’s both a leader and a pariah.”

For the sermon, the priest switches from ecclesiastical Latin to everyday Polish. “You used to be so passionate about your faith and your national identity,” he says. “Now all that is gone. Why?” The reproach seems to be directed exclusively at the male members of the congregation. They lower their heads penitently.

The mass was held at a small chapel belonging to the Society of Saint Pius X, an organisation of Catholic priests established by Marcel Lefebvre, a controversial French archbishop who was excommunicated by Pope John Paul II, patron saint and supreme icon of modern Polish Catholicism. Performed in traditional Latin rather than Polish, the ceremony at Wawer contained deeply traditional elements that even the most conservative of Poland’s churchgoers might have found archaic. It was arranged at the behest of the Independence March Association, a Polish far-Right organisation that convenes an annual march on Independence Day, rallying tens of thousands of ultra-nationalists to declare their hostility to “cultural Marxism” while affirming their “patriotism” and “traditional” Polish values.

The head of the Independence March Association, Robert Bakiewicz, is the closest thing to a leader for Poland’s extra-parliamentary far-Right. At the mass in Wawer, he could pass for the doorman of an upmarket nightclub — burly physique, smart grey overcoat, military-grade haircut. Contemplating the altar, he is periodically interrupted by uniformed lieutenants equipped with wireless earpieces and armbands.

Bakiewicz is among the minority of Catholic traditionalists worldwide who prefer to attend mass in the original Latin rather than in their native languages. The traditionalists believe the mainstream Catholic way of worship has strayed from dogma and become too liberal. As they see it, the Latin, or Tridentine, mass still preserves the splendour and sanctity of the pre-modern Church.

On social media, the Latin mass is associated with the “trad Caths” — Anglophone internet-speak for an increasingly visible new generation of online Catholics. The trad Caths of Instagram and TikTok share content celebrating the values and aesthetics of traditional Catholicism, in tones that veer between the playful and the unabashedly sincere. Bakiewicz has joined in the fun, but his trad Cath identity is also a political statement. It signifies a rejection of the Polish clerical establishment and a recalibration of the far-Right’s relationship with Church and state. It also underlines his own credentials. To lead the far-Right, you must be more nationalist than the nationalists, and more Catholic than the Catholics. And there is no better way of demonstrating that in today’s Poland than by being seen at Latin mass.

Poland’s nationalists have traditionally been close allies of its Church leaders. Through Nazi occupation and Soviet dominance, they served as joint custodians of national identity, active in the resistance and in the preservation of Polish culture. Over the last decade however, the clergy has been hit by a series of scandals that have weakened its standing, leaving it looking like the junior partner in its alliance with the Right-wing government. Media reports have exposed the profligacy of Polish bishops, who spent donations to the Church on expensive cars, real estate and lavish renovation schemes. More damagingly, senior clergy in Poland have been implicated in committing and covering up child abuse.

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The scandals have prompted accusations that the clerical establishment has been behaving like an unaccountable elite, corrupted by power and privilege. Indeed, the far-Right’s criticism of Church leaders has a distinctly populist tone. “I will send my men to protect churches,” Bakiewicz told me in October 2020, as an effective ban on abortions ignited anti-clerical protests across Poland. “But I will never send them to protect the palaces of bishops.”

Matters have not been helped by the current Pope. Hailed as a reformist by liberals, Pope Francis has irked conservatives in Poland and beyond, prompting many to question his judgement. Traditionalists have been particularly troubled by the Pope’s decision to restrict access to the Latin mass, reversing efforts by his predecessor, Pope Benedict, to restore some legitimacy to the ancient rite. Where the era of Pope John Paul II marked the consolidation of the relationship between Poland’s nationalists and clergy, the era of Pope Francis coincides with its weakening. “It’s not like we disobey the Pope, the hierarchs,” Bakiewicz said. “But one cannot ever accept others preaching a false gospel, even if it is — to quote Saint Paul — an angel descended from heaven.”

In the battle with liberal values, the far-Right in Poland is broadly aligned with the government. Led by the national-conservative Law and Justice party, the government picks fights with Brussels, intimidates independent judges and journalists, demonises the campaign for LGBT rights, more or less prohibits abortions, and persecutes refugees and migrants unless they happen to be Ukrainian. Poland’s far-Right movement supports these policies on the streets, and some of its biggest players, such as Bakiewicz, are in turn supported financially by the government. Investigative journalists in Poland have revealed that the government has paid more than €1 million in public subsidies to organisations linked to Bakiewicz.

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According to Mikolaj Czesnik, a political scientist and professor at Warsaw’s SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, the government uses far-Right figures such as Bakiewicz to fly a kite for its most hardline policies. “You do not need an army to do that — a few people on the streets of Warsaw is enough,” he said. “The nationalists openly hate Brussels, the people hear that, and this allows the PM to come out and say that he is taking a tough stance against the European Commission because he values the Polish people over some foreign, cosmopolitan greater good.”

Bakiewicz began his political career as a foot soldier in the ONR, the largest and oldest formation within Poland’s far-Right eco-system. The ONR — its initials stand for National Radical Camp — claims to be the ideological heir to an organisation of the same name whose cadres hounded Poland’s Jews and leftists in the run-up to World War Two. Its present-day membership is known for its Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and hostility to LGBT rights, as well as its belief in an ethnically pure Poland. A recent ruling by Poland’s supreme court decreed that the ONR could reasonably be described as “fascist”, although the court stopped short of endorsing that description. The movement rejects the label — fascism is technically outlawed in Poland — even if some of its members have been pictured marching in brown shirts and performing Roman salutes.

Bakiewicz became known at the ONR for his rousing speeches and all-round tough guy image — qualities that, according to his supporters, have helped shake the far-Right out of its anomie and restore its sense of purpose. He was born in 1976 in Pruszkow, a satellite town of Warsaw that acquired a reputation for gangland violence in the post-communist transition. As a young man, he ran a small construction company, filing for bankruptcy in 2011, around the same time as he became active in the ONR. Media outlets also reported that he had been granted a divorce at around this time, with his financial problems cited as a contributory factor. Bakiewicz has refused to speak to the press about this period in his life.

He agreed to our interview on condition that we would only discuss matters of faith. Questions about his financial history were strictly off-limits, and nor was I able to ask him about a 2017 interview in which he used a slur for gay people and referred to homosexuality as an illness threatening the traditional family.

Our meeting took place in Bakiewicz’s office, in a tower block in Warsaw’s genteel Zoliborz district. I waited in a hallway where religious icons hung on the wall. A stack of newspapers beside the chair contained a range of Left and Right-wing publications, many with handwritten comments scribbled on the front-page stories. Bakiewicz tends to avoid speaking to established media outlets, opting to get his message across via his YouTube channel. I began the interview by asking about his enthusiasm for the Latin mass. He responded that the modern mass, replacing the Latin version, undermined the Church’s claim to universality — the claim, in other words, that its teachings applied equally to everyone. “The Church cannot suddenly start changing what it used to preach,” he said, because universality also meant that the institution “needs to be understood in the same way”.

Almost all churches in Poland conduct the mass in the Polish language, a legacy of the Second Vatican Council (1962-5), which resulted in sweeping liberalising reforms. Importantly, priests were permitted to celebrate mass in the native language of the congregation rather than Latin. Deeply conservative factions within the Church, however, rejected the changes. Some of these factions, including Lefebvre’s Society of Saint Pius X, were eventually cast out by the Vatican. Bakiewicz embraced the Lefebvre movement three years ago, after a public spat with Church leaders in Warsaw who had refused to host a Latin mass for his followers.

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In the interview at his office, Bakiewicz heaped scorn on the clerical establishment. He accused it of taking a passive stance during the protests against the abortion law in 2020, thereby neglecting a fundamental duty to stand up for the faith. He also criticised the clergy over its response to the arrival in Poland of more than three million Ukrainian refugees fleeing the conflict with Russia. Ukrainians now account for nearly 8% of Poland’s population, marking a dramatic shift for a country characterised since World War Two by the absence of any sizeable minorities.

The homogeneity of contemporary Polish identity is typically upheld by the far-Right as a virtue. Toward the Ukrainians however, allies in the confrontation with the historic Russian enemy, there is no overt hostility. “These people came to us from a war-torn country,” Bakiewicz said, striking a paternalistic note. “It’s not the time to think about trivial, materialistic things.” But the Polish clergy, in his view, was once again at fault — it had missed an opportunity to bring the Ukrainians, most of whom follow a branch of the Eastern Orthodox church, within the fold. “I am disappointed that the Polish Church is not fighting for these souls,” Bakiewicz said.

The proposed mass conversion of a displaced people may sound like anachronistic fantasy, but it encapsulates a particular view of faith and nation on the far-Right. Some refugees are welcome, in this view, if they can be assimilated into the faith, reinforcing rather than altering it. According to the traditionalists, it is the willingness of the Church to be altered, to change with the times, that lies at the heart of its current malaise. Under Pope Francis, the Vatican has softened its rhetoric towards LGBT minorities, condemned Europe’s policy towards migrants, and sought to find common ground with the leaders of other faiths. “If the Pope suggests that all religions are equal,” Bakiewicz said, “it means that the Catholic martyrs, those who were put to death because they refused to convert, would have died in vain.”

Despite their vocal objections to the current Pope, the traditionalists maintain that they have not crossed the line into outright defiance of papal authority – a move that might call their identity as Catholics into question. One of Bakiewicz’s ideological soulmates in Polish politics, Robert Winnicki, threads the needle between criticism and defiance of the Pope by painting a bleak picture of the Church in peril. “The ship is sinking and the lifeboats are being lowered,” he said. “The Latin mass movement is one of those lifeboats. It will not operate against the Vatican, but in spite of it.”

***

This story was produced as part of the Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Editing by Neil Arun.

It seems jarring, then, to hear Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propagandists claim that according to their latest intelligence, Poland is secretly planning to invade and annex the territories in western Ukraine that it used to control prior to the Second World War. Yet this is exactly the narrative that members of Putin’s inner circle like Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergey Naryshkin and Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev have been pushing for months, buoyed by support from state-backed Russian media over the past few weeks.

Pro-Kremlin actors have gone to great lengths to support this claim. A supposed order signed by a Polish general authorising Polish troops to enter Ukraine’s Lviv and Volyn oblasts was recently circulated on social media before being confirmed to be a forgery, and propagandists like Patrushev have jumped on cherry-picked comments from Duda, who stated in May that “there will not be a border” between Poland and Ukraine. On August 23, the press director for Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs went as far as to compare Duda to Hitler because of his comments on Polish business ventures in Ukraine.

In reality, however, Duda was quoting Zelenskyy himself back in May, and was speaking about prospects for increased cooperation and strengthened diplomatic ties between the two countries. A few weeks later, Zelenskyy revealed that Ukraine was set to grant Poles “special legal status” in Ukraine in response to Poland’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, and the two countries agreed on joint customs control at their border to facilitate the movement of people and goods between them.

With all this in mind, it’s hard to imagine that the Kremlin earnestly believes its own rhetoric on Poland’s supposed plans to invade Ukraine. Its frequently repeated talking points on this front are best understood as a multi-pronged propaganda effort aimed at the Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish publics that seeks to further justify Russian aggression in Ukraine and to sow discord between Kyiv and its new allies in Warsaw.

But even though such propaganda might seem easily disprovable amid the ever-growing labyrinth of Russian disinformation about Ukraine, the fact that the Kremlin is pursuing it tells us a great deal about how Putin sees the war, nationhood in Eastern Europe, and the nature of international relations in the region itself. In his view, politics in the region have remained fundamentally unchanged since the Thirties and Forties. For him, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and all peoples of the former Soviet sphere continue to be motivated by nationalistic desires of revenge and irredentism that can be exploited for the benefit of world powers like Russia. Yet this attempt to rouse century-old passions is doomed to fail, and by continuing to employ the political logic of a bygone era, Putin has revealed just how out of touch Russia’s foreign policy is with the realities of the 21st century.

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The history that Putin’s confidantes are riffing on when spreading claims of Polish invasion plans comes from the interwar period, when the newly independent Polish state controlled territory in modern Ukraine, including the oblasts of Lviv, Lutsk, and Ivano-Frankivsk. Poland had acquired some of these lands during the chaotic period following the First World War under the leadership of Polish general and statesman Józef Piłsudski, who envisioned a return to Poland’s glory days prior to its dismemberment by Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1795.

In the Ukrainian territories, Polish authorities’ heavy-handed response to local Ukrainian demands for autonomy led to the foundation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which, after Poland’s defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany, launched a series of massacres in 1943 that resulted in the deaths of up 100,000 Polish civilians. In 1945, Poland lost these lands to the USSR, and they have remained part of independent Ukraine since 1991.

The UPA’s killings of Poles during the war, which Poland considers to be an act of genocide, remain a contentious issue, and Duda has requested that Ukraine recognise it as such as recently as this July during an official commemoration. But unfortunately for Putin, Poland has regarded the territorial disputes that lay behind the violence as a closed case for decades. As Duda stated at this year’s memorial for the victims of the wartime massacres, the recognition of the UPA’s massacres “was not about and is not about revenge, about any retaliation — there is no better proof of this than the time we have now”.

According to recent polls, Ukrainians are now inclined to trust Poland more than ever — some 86% of Ukrainians from all regions of the country reported that their view of Poland has improved since the start of Russia’s invasion, with 72% stating their opinion has “improved a lot”. And in an environment where both the Polish and Ukrainian populations are now overwhelmingly wary of Russian propaganda, disinformation about Polish plans to regain its Ukrainian territories is unlikely to spur a nationalistic falling-out over either the legacy of the UPA or Poland’s territorial legacy in western Ukraine.

But there is another, broader aim of Putin’s propaganda effort on this matter: if Russia can claim that Poland and other European states are covetous of other countries’ land, then Russia can do it too. “The thing is that there are quite a few locations on the European continent where neighbours are silently interested in the territories of adjacent states,” Naryshkin stated earlier this month, according to Russian state media agency TASS. “So if Poland opens this Pandora’s box, there will be hell to pay.”

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This is the central, if implicit, assertion that Putin and his loyalists are making when they spread lies about Poland’s intentions — that Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine is far from abnormal. It is difficult to read Naryshkin’s quote here without recalling Putin’s own characterisation of his invasion of Ukraine as “our responsibility to return land” back to Russia during a conference in June, where the Russian president seemed to compare himself to Tsar Peter the Great.

Even if the Poles do not have plans to recapture their lost territories in Ukraine, Putin is certain they would eventually like to do so — after all, why wouldn’t they? In Putin’s worldview, it is only natural for nations to seek to regain past glory like Piłsudski had, either by conquering land from other states, outmanoeuvring neighbours, or settling scores over unresolved grievances. By the same token, for countries like Ukraine, a historic enemy must always be an enemy, and blood that was once spilled can always be spilled again.

For Putin, international politics is a zero-sum game in which one power ultimately seeks to dominate others. In pursuing their disinformation campaign about Poland, Putin and the rest of the Kremlin are projecting their own worldview onto neighbouring countries, assuming that the nationalistic triggers that motivated violence between Poles, Ukrainians and various other Eastern European peoples remain as potent now as they did in 1943.

But the ship of history has long sailed in both the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands and across much of Europe, and Russia’s leaders have seemingly been left behind. Only now are they waking up to the reality that common defence can actually work, and that countries that were once the bitterest of enemies can look beyond their past to stand up to cynically nationalistic, unilateralist powers of the sort that the Russian state has now become. In seeking to exploit the wounds of history, Russia has found itself trapped by it.

If a shooting war between Nato and Russia were ever to break out, it is highly likely it will be here. The Gap provides the only rail and gas pipeline land routes between the EU and the three Nato Baltic States, leaving them vulnerable to Russian aggression. Yet it also gives Nato the opportunity to prevent Putin from accessing Kaliningrad, the only Russian port on the Baltic Sea that doesn’t freeze over in winter. The isolated city is home to 15,000 troops, a collection of Iskander missiles, and a purported flow of illegal weapons out to the EU.

This is not the first time tensions in the Suwalki Gap have caused alarm. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Russian troops carried out aggressive military exercises across the region, cementing its reputation as Nato’s Achilles’s heel. But the situation might escalate further: in June, Lithuania began enforcing EU sanctions on Russian iron, steel and luxury goods being transported to Kaliningrad. A Kremlin official retaliated by threatening “serious” consequences for Lithuania; not long after, the Lithuanian government was hit by a wave of cyberattacks and bomb threats. In response, the EU Commission last month withdrew sanctions on goods, except weapons, moving between Russia and Kaliningrad.

On leaving the train station in the Polish town of Suwalki, from which the Gap takes its name, one of the first things I saw was a giant billboard across the road, exclaiming in Russian: “Putin, iди наxyй” (Putin, fuck you), before switching to Polish to exclaim “Bez Odbioru” (Over and out), and then with a flourish in Ukrainian “Слава Україні” (Slava Ukrayini).

This show of outward support for Ukraine was a stark contrast to the nearby Polish-Ukrainian border town of Rzeszow, where just the day before I had encountered a couple of hundred Polish nationalists gathered in the town square to remember the 1943 Volhynia Massacre of 50,000 to 100,000 ethnic Poles by Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera’s militias. A Polish man in black uniform screamed down the microphone about the “Banderite Ukrainian fascist threat” as bemused international aid workers lounged about drinking beer.

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The historian Timothy Synder has described this Central and Eastern European zone as “the bloodlands”: a vast stretch of soil characterised by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia’s slaughter of millions. After years of 20th-century bloodshed, many of its residents remain consumed by their national history. Even in Suwalki, a key point for cross-European solidarity, there are murals dedicated to national conflict. One contemporary mural, on the side of a building, commemorates the Sejny Uprising of 1919, when the minority Polish population of Sejny, a nearby town, led by a secret nationalist group the Polish Military Organisation, attacked the Lithuanian army.

On a hill overlooking the nearby village of Giby stands a Polish flag, surrounded by a vast sea of crucifixes. This national-religious monument commemorates the Augustów Roundup, when more than 600 Polish nationalist partisans in the area were executed over the border in Belarus in 1945 by Soviet forces. Nearby, I met Colonel Piotr Augustynowicz and two young privates, Slomka and Gutowski, who were busy preparing for the annual remembrance of the Roundup. They were members of the Association of the Polish Military Organisation: a continuation of the Polish Military Organisation, a secret group designed to throw off the suzerainty of the Russians, create a patriotic fighting force, inculcate a civic form of Polish nationalism, and reconquer the old lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.

Slomka didn’t seem scared of living close to Russia: “It’s nothing,” he said. “I think we are prepared for everything.” Growing up in the Suwalki area, he had only met Ukrainians and never Russians — despite the country being only a few kilometres away. For Gutowski, living so close to Russia and Belarus “didn’t seem like a big deal — they are not connected”. When I asked if they believed Russian media rhetoric about a possible invasion of the Suwalki Gap, Augustynowicz simply responded: “They can try.”

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Across the border in Lithuania, I visited the city of Alytus, which hosts the Grand Duchess Birutė Mechanised Uhlan Battalion — part of Lithuania’s contribution to Nato collective defence operations — in a barracks built for the Russian Tsar’s army in the 19th century. There, first lieutenant Žygimantas Mituzas told me: “Strategically, it’s good that Lithuania and Poland are working together.” Tensions over Lithuania’s imposition of EU sanctions on Kaliningrad “didn’t give, or generate, any extra [Nato] deployment to the region — but since the invasion of Ukraine there has been more public attention turned to the military”.

On a firing range across the base, I met several late-teenage conscripts — Lithuania reintroduced conscription in 2015 after Russia annexed Crimea. Over the crackle of automatic rifle shots, I talked to Private Dukleris, a short young man with an American-tinged English accent. He seemed hesitantly positive about the situation in the Suwalki Gap, saying: “There’s nothing to be concerned about just yet…”

Dukleris generally seemed to think Nato was helping to deescalate tensions: “I’m happy that we have allies that we can fight alongside. It’s a big network of, well, I want to say friendship, but that’s not very accurate.” He said that Polish-Lithuanian relations had improved after years of low-level tension: “There’s a deep history from before the Middle Ages — we do have this connection. We’re kind of like a couple that broke up but stayed good friends.” His own connection to Poland came in the form of conscripts from mixed families: “There are quite a few Polish-Lithuanian folks here [at the base], so I’m friends with them.”

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Simonas Jazavita, a historian at Kaunas City Museum, is also keen to emphasise the historical intra-Polish-Lithuanian unity against Russia. He described how the Poles and Lithuanians had understood themselves as a defence wall, or bulwark (przedmurze) of Latin Christianity against the Orthodox East: “It was common during wars between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia, that the conflict be treated not as a simple war between neighbours (like most conflicts) but as a clash of civilisations. There was a popular conception called antemurale in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the time — meaning behind the wall.”

But what is the guiding ideology behind the reconstructed Polish-Lithuanian wall? While America talks of a reaffirmed liberal word order, the attitude on the ground speaks to a different vision. Indeed, the “most dangerous place on earth” seems haunted by ghosts from the past just as much as it is by the presence of an expansionist Russia. For the residents of the Suwalki Gap, both the past and the present find themselves at the centre of a renewed struggle for power.

A few days earlier, my wife and I had met her Ukrainian family at 4am, 24 hours after they fled their home in Kyiv. We had flown out to meet her mother, two brothers (aged 8 and 15), and female cousin (16). Just like thousands of other refugees, we were crammed into a small, rented flat on the border of the old town.

We had little idea how the UK government would handle their visa applications, but I feared the process would be like everything else involving the Home Office: slow, inflexible, and infused with suspicion. My wife and I experienced this first-hand when applying for her own visa. Compared to the digitised registry office in Kyiv where we had married two years ago, the Home Office proved incapable of executing its most basic functions, hamstrung by a combination of bureaucracy and xenophobia.

Back then, none of her family could have imagined that they would be forced to flee their homes amid artillery strikes and rumours that Putin’s mercenaries were roaming the streets. But after enduring a day of bombings, they had little choice. Their initial plan was to drive to the city of Lutsk near the Polish border, where they had family. But Lutsk had also been bombed, the roads heading West were blocked, and there were reports that Belarusian forces were poised to sweep in from the North.

So they drove south, leaving behind everything they couldn’t carry. Trying to avoid the main roads, they travelled for 16 hours, stopping finally at Khmelnytskyi. The following morning, as the situation became clearer — and as the scale of Ukraine’s heroic military resistance became obvious — they eventually decided to risk heading to Lutsk. After much agonising, the family collected a cousin, said goodbye to their father (who, like all men aged between 18 and 60, had to remain behind and be ready to be called up to fight).

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Back at the visa centre, Home Office staff — some of whom had been flown in overnight — rushed from one group to the next, trying to explain what little information they knew to those who spoke little or no English. They were dealing with a WiFi network that kept crashing, laptops that had no chargers, and IT systems that stubbornly refused to accept their login details. At one point, someone copied my family’s passport numbers onto a piece of paper and handed it to someone else, who immediately copied the numbers onto another piece of paper, which was passed to a third person — who promptly put the slip of paper in the bin.

It took about a week for their visas to be issued, even though it was clear that many at the Home Office and visa centres were working throughout the night. The government has now announced a 48-hour target for processing applications, but it remains to be seen whether this is anything other than wishful thinking: I suspect my family won’t be the last to flee Ukraine with little more than the clothes on their back, only to shell out for a hotel while they wait for the wheels of Britain’s Rolls-Royce bureaucracy to turn.

The government insists that detailed security checks are vital to stop spies and people traffickers, while ignoring the lumbering clunkiness that defines its system as a whole. First, the Home Office in London sets the rules, and applications are conducted on the GOV.UK website. Then, an outsourced company called TLS Connect collects documents and biometrics at visa centres across the world (the one in Warsaw uses temporary offices inside a hotel). Applications are then sent back to Home Office centres across the UK. Here, staff reportedly use three completely different and incompatible systems, some of which are 20 years old, to check documents and run background checks. The applications, if successful, are then sent back to TLS Connect to distribute the visas and stamped passports. Once in the UK, this paper visa is then used to collect an ID permit.

Of course, my Ukrainian family are grateful for the sanctuary they can find in the UK: their visas grant them rights to work, study, and claim state support. The alternative — remaining in Kyiv — doesn’t bear thinking about.

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But the uncomfortable truth is that no visa can solve the more serious problems they face. While Kyiv is neither Mariupol nor Kharkiv, it is hard to predict what, if anything, my family will have to return to. The small restaurant they own lies in a village on the city’s outskirts that has seen some of the fiercest fighting in the area. Tales from their employees of looting Russian soldiers using the business as a base provide some warning of what to expect, but the revelations at Bucha still leave us numb. Yet still they remain certain they want to go back.

What will they do in the meantime? Well, it all depends on whether they manage to escape the complex web of Britain’s bureaucratic state. For instance, everyone in the UK knows the reams of paperwork involved in registering for a GP. Yet even I couldn’t help but laugh when my eight-year-old brother-in-law was told to fill out three forms about his alcohol consumption. Meanwhile, in an effort to register them for under-16 Oyster cards, I have become trapped between several different Transport for London systems, none of which will read their passports to verify their ages. At one point, I was invited to go to a TfL office which had been closed for several years.

Contrast this with the response of friends, neighbours and strangers, and it’s hard not to feel anything but exasperation. Since returning, we have been overwhelmed by spontaneous acts of generosity: donations of clothes, toys, and electronics; invitations to join sports clubs and visit museums; offers of after-school lessons from teachers who are happy to put in a word to get the kids registered at schools. One neighbour, out of the blue, announced he had tickets for a Spurs game, collected the elder brother, and handed him a white replica shirt (the boy, at least until now, preferred Manchester City, home of the Ukrainian defender Oleksandr Zinchenko — but we don’t tell our neighbour).

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And this spirit is being channelled across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for the government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme. There is a widespread, almost populist, demand that Britain do more to help. Yet at every turn, the Home Office seems intent on making the system for registering for the scheme impossible to negotiate.

It is hard to imagine those fleeing the Blitz being found homes in the countryside under today’s conditions. Only yesterday, for example, it was reported that councils have denied applications from volunteers whose houses have plug sockets “that endangered children because they were placed too low in the walls”. Elsewhere, hosts have been rejected “because ponds in gardens needed to be drained before child refugees could move in”.

This, then, is my overwhelming impression of these strange few weeks: the enormous, perhaps unexpected, generosity of the British people, contrasted with the suffocating bureaucracy of the British state. It is only through the fresh eyes of my family that I realise how resigned to this shameful state we have become. We, not to mention those fleeing war, deserve better.

Today marks three weeks since Putin launched his invasion and already thousands have been killed — perhaps significantly more, if the latest estimates from Mariupol are to be believed. There are mass graves, bodies strewn in the streets, desperate attempts to survive by melting snow for drinking water.

We have all marvelled at the Ukrainians’ bravery as they fight to defend their country and people. But the price of their heroism has been terrible suffering. Right now, the United States and its Nato allies are focused on targeting the Russian economy with sanctions, as well as sending weapons and other forms of military aid into Ukraine. Both efforts must continue. But there is also a dire need to help civilians no longer in the country — those who have decided to flee the daily barrage of missiles, bombs and bullets.

This week, the UN estimated that more than 2.8 million people have now escaped. With Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 60 required to remain and help with the war effort, most leaving are women, children, and the frail, running from the relentless shelling of their cities and villages. More are expected to leave in the coming weeks: the UN’s High Commission for Refugees has estimated that 12 million people still inside Ukraine will need help.

European countries have already taken moderate steps to accept refugees. The Schengen zone has dropped visa requirements, requiring only a biometric passport to enter. The EU has granted the right to stay and work in the EU for up to three years. But more needs to be done.

First, the West can prove its continued support of Ukraine by conducting a large-scale humanitarian airlift to save those trapped in encircled cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv, or captured ones such as Kherson. Getting them out and to a safe country should be the top priority. We attempted this in Afghanistan last year; there’s no reason we shouldn’t do the same now.

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Once these people have left, we need to ensure they can reach host countries across Europe, especially the wealthier northern European countries. For years, the European Union has constantly spoken of the importance of “burden sharing”. Now is the time for it to demonstrate it knows what the term means. As things stand, the burden on Poland — there are 1.8 million refugees there — is too great. This is a crisis for all Europe, and should be treated as such.

In 1992, after fleeing a forced marriage in Somalia, I spent 11 months living in an asylum-seeker centre in Lunteren, the Netherlands, with individuals from around the world. One group in particular stood out: those from the former Yugoslavia. Given the proximity of the conflict to the European Union, those running from the Balkan states were bussed into the centre from the border. I cannot recall another refugee group being treated this way, but it sets a clear precedent that asylum seekers escaping a European conflict should be provided with transport to reach safety.

Once there, Ukrainians deserve protection and accommodation. Those who fled in the first weeks of the conflict often had friends in foreign countries who provided them with housing. But as the scale of evacuees continue to rise, that is no longer the case. People today are desperate: a family may have a suitcase between them, but no plan for what comes next. This is where European governments need to step in.

And so far, they are failing. This week, the British government announced its Homes for Ukraine scheme, which will pay volunteers £350 a month tax-free for opening their homes to those fleeing the conflict. The response was undeniably heartening: more than 100,000 people signed up in the first day. But even with the best of intentions, such enthusiasm can’t hide the fact that the proposal is nothing more than a gimmick, designed to fill headlines rather than remedy the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

Ukrainians don’t need shelter, safety and accommodation next week, or the week after. They need it today. Every European country should be expediting this process. With the recent passage of the European Commission’s “Cohesion Action for Refugees in Europe” proposal, which allocates €10 billion humanitarian aid for Ukrainians, there is no reason we can’t immediately guarantee accommodation for those fleeing.

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If we don’t, in the coming weeks they could be forced to substitute one type of inhumane barbarity for another. Already there are reports of trafficking gangs waiting near the border for young women and children. One man has been detained in Poland, suspected of raping a 19-year-old refugee he had ensnared with an offer of shelter. Another was heard attempting to lure in a 16-year-old girl before authorities intervened. In the UK, meanwhile, the National Crime Agency estimates that there are at least 6,000 modern slavery offenders in the country. “We can be certain that some of this number will be seeing the Homes for Ukraine scheme as an opportunity to turn a profit,” one expert has warned.

This must not be allowed to happen. Young Ukrainian women must not end up in red-light districts across Europe because they fled their homes and fell into the wrong hands. Nato and the EU may not deem it appropriate to support the Ukrainians with a no-fly zone — but surely we can protect them from being further dehumanised by opportunistic criminal syndicates. It is the least we owe them.

And then there is the need for a long-term plan. It is all very well offering citizens a wad of cash to take in refugees, but what comes next? For those entering Europe, the sooner we reintroduce them to a normal life the better. Asylum-seeker centres are often like human holding pens — they provide food, shelter and basic healthcare. But, as I discovered in the Netherlands, life as a refugee is a waiting game. Typically, refugees spend their days waiting for paperwork to be approved, waiting to be allowed to go to school, or waiting to be allowed to work.

It is cruel and dispiriting to keep any human in this condition of uncertainty — and especially so with the people fleeing Putin’s bombs. Once the Ukrainians arrive, we need to rush them into language and skill-building classes immediately. We need to help them find jobs and put their children in schools. This is the only way they will be able cope with the mental and emotional trauma that is the aftermath of the war.

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But we must also start planning for their repatriation, closely tied to the swift rebuilding of Ukraine. After all, most of the refugees will want to return to their homes, if they can, as soon as possible. With the mass destruction of cities and towns, significant investments — nothing less than a new Marshall Plan — will be needed to rebuild the country.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has failed Ukraine time and again. They were persuaded, in 1994, to give up their nuclear weapons in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. They’ve been strung along for years with the promise of joining Nato and the EU. And they were left to fend for themselves when Putin started to amass tanks on their doorstep.

The only moral course for the West now is to stop making hollow promises — and to start supporting the refugees. Perhaps it is too late to save their country, but it is not too late to save them. Every day the invasion continues, Ukraine shows the West the cost of freedom and the courage needed to take on tyrants. It’s now our turn to step up and start bearing some of that cost.