What is Poland's Role in Ukraine and Could Warsaw Go Through With Plans to Invade?

What is Poland's Role in Ukraine and Could Warsaw Go Through With Plans to Invade?

Sputnik

Russian officials have expressed growing concern about suspected plans by Poland to seize western Ukraine, either to turn it into a NATO protectorate or outright annex it. What are the chances of this happening? What’s the current state of Polish-Ukrainian relations? And how has Poland been affected by the Ukrainian crisis? Sputnik explains.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu accused Warsaw of harboring ambitions to establish a permanent military presence in western Ukraine on Wednesday, saying Polish troops could be dispatched to the country, "ostensibly to ensure…security,” but “in fact – for the subsequent occupation of this territory."

Shoigu’s comments come in the wake of warnings by President Putin last month calling on Warsaw not to follow through with any “revanchist plans” to seize Ukrainian lands, with Putin recalling that Poland surrendered its claims to western Ukraine at the end of the Second World War after receiving German lands as “a gift from Stalin to the Poles.”

Putin and Shoigu’s concerns were recently echoed by Russian Foreign Intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin, who similarly said that Russia has picked up on chatter within the Polish leadership about efforts to “introduce control” in western Ukraine.

Polish officials have dismissed Russian concerns about Warsaw’s intentions, or refused to comment. However, former NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen may have let the cat out of the bag in June when he said that “some countries,” including Poland, might “individually take action” and assemble a new “coalition of the willing” to deploy troops in Ukraine.

Poland’s claims to large swathes of Ukraine go back to the era of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - the long-defunct Eastern European super-state which once controlled vast territories in present-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, parts of northwestern Russia, Lithuania, Latvia and a piece of Estonia between the 16thto the 18th centuries. The commonwealth disappeared from the map of Europe in the late 1700s after being partitioned by the Russian Empire, Prussia and Austria, with Poland only reemerging as an independent state in 1918, as Russia was engulfed in internal strife following the February and October Revolutions of 1917.

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