Notes From the Upside Down XI: Poland, the 'Hyenas of Europe' (Churchill), is Back and Taking EUrope to the Precipice

Another piece by Russian media Vesti7 that provides a different perspective than that peddled by Western legacy media

Editorial note: due to my work-related travels (and my altered and reduced time schedule), below you’ll find yet another translated piece from Russian media outlet Vesti7. It too appeared on Sunday, 27 March, in a newscast.

By now, apart from the US throwing EUrope and EUropeans under the bus over their geopolitical struggle with (against) Russia and China (‘Eurasia’). Sure, Mr. Biden has been to Warsaw and did his bit of huffing and puffing, but so far even the hotheads among the small-to-medium sized East Central European states (the Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine) have been reluctant to actually fight on Ukraine’s side. Mr. Biden specifically told the Poles that their idea to send ‘NATO peacekeepers’ to western Ukraine is a bad idea.

So far, Poland has not doubled down on this militarily, yet diplomatically, Warsaw has kicked out most Russian diplomats and, on top of it, froze the accounts of the Russian embassy (which is both against the Vienna Convention and quite unprecedented.

So, without much further ado, here’s Vesti7’s piece, with due apologies for the somewhat altered posting style and substance of this week (emphases mine).

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USA Rejects Poland’s Proposals

Joe Biden’s visit to Poland is over. They had been waiting and preparing for it for a long time. In the run-up to the visit, Poland even stood out: it offered to send its troops to Ukraine, to increase arms supplies there, and claimed it was ready to wrest Kaliningrad from Russia as well. All this is a continuation of historical claims that never made Poland happy. And now again.

Half of Warsaw was blocked because of the meeting with Biden. Two flags—one American and one Polish—were attached to the US president’s limousine. The motorcade reached the presidential palace [the above picture].

The issue of US arms supplies, both to Poland and Ukraine, is one of the most important. President Duda eagerly leaves the carpet to receive his guest right in front of his car. This is Biden’s first time here as president, and of all the EU countries, he chose Poland for the separate visit.

And Warsaw did everything to ensure that the guest from overseas was not disappointed. Two days before the visit, Poland had announced the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats—45 diplomats or three quarters of the Russian diplomatic corps in Poland—under the pretext of espionage, and then did the unthinkable: froze the accounts of the Russian embassy with the phrase ‘for financing terrorism’. And during the meeting, the same theme was heard over and over again: ‘Russian aggression’ and the need to ‘contain Moscow’.

‘We want to pursue this policy together with the US, we count on the determination and toughness of the American leadership throughout the North Atlantic Alliance’, Duda said.

In fact, Poland has also tried to dictate the agenda of the NATO summit in advance by floating the idea of possibly sending a so-called peacekeeping contingent of up to 10,000 troops from the alliance to western Ukraine. Warsaw planned for NATO troops to supposedly secure the humanitarian corridors, which would of course require the establishment of a no-fly zone over them. Even the White House balked at this prospect.

Moscow has also warned of the possible consequences. ‘Our Polish colleagues have already said that peacekeepers should be sent there. I hope they understand what they are talking about. This will lead to a direct clash between Russian and NATO forces, which everyone not only wanted to avoid, but which everyone said should not happen in principle’, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

All the more so because Western mercenaries had already been hit by a direct Russian missile attack—on a training ground near Lviv. So, the Poles were finally offered the chance to act on their own—without NATO and thus without the bloc’s obligations to protect them in the event of a direct clash with Russia.

‘We will not send NATO troops and aircraft to Ukraine because we are responsible for ensuring that the conflict does not go beyond Ukraine. That would bring more suffering, death and destruction’, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is convinced.

But Poland’s Plan B, the call for all-out economic war against Russia, has been put into effect. Warsaw is pushing the idea of blocking road corridors, which could result in the collapse of the entire European economy. Poland is also insisting on refusing Russian oil and gas, although queues for fuel are already forming at petrol stations in Poland.

‘Russia is trying to make us pay in Roubles. We should not agree to that. We must do everything we can to supply Ukraine with defensive weapons and impose the toughest sanctions on Russia’, Poland says.

Yet it is not an economic giant that wants to implement such radical ideas. Poland’s economy ranks only 26th in Europe in terms of GDP per capita and the country lives largely on EU subsidies. Since 2004, Warsaw has received almost 200 billion euros from Brussels. So, the sanctions banquet is to be paid for by others.

‘Prime Minister Morawiecki said that Poland is the director of Western sanctions and other unfriendly measures. It is a fact that Poland produces the most extreme ideas when it comes to breaking with us on all fronts’, said Sergei Andreyev, the Russian ambassador to Poland.

Here is an example of that extremism. The former commander of the land forces, Waldemar Skrzyczak, said on television that Russia’s Kaliningrad should belong to Poland: ‘Poland should raise the question of the affiliation of the Kaliningrad region, which has been occupied by Russia since 1945. This area was never Russian, but historically belonged to Prussia and Poland. It should now be called a reclaimed land. In my opinion, the Kaliningrad region is part of Poland’, he said.

And this despite the fact that Kaliningrad—formerly Königsberg—was never Polish and the Polish Gdansk was the German Danzig until recently [1945]. Poland received [Gdansk and part of Prussia] thanks to the victory of the USSR in the Second World War and because of the results of the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. Just as Poland received the northern part of former East Prussia and large areas in the west. That is why today’s Polish Szczecin is the former German Stettin and Wrocław the former Breslau.

But instead of showing gratitude for the considerable territorial gains, Poland dies this: a monument to soldiers of the Red Army who liberated Poland, located in Chrzowice in the country’s southwest, was dismantled on live television. It was erected in 1949 on the spot where 620 Red Army soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian Front [Soviet army group] died. Polish officials made speeches about ‘celebrating liberation from the Soviets’ while the five-pointed star was hammered down from the obelisk with a hammer and sickle. And then the monument was completely destroyed to tumultuous applause.

About the difficult historical past, President Duda complained to Biden: ‘Poles know what Russian imperialism means, the attack of the Russian army, because our grandfathers and great-grandfathers survived it.’

Yet official Warsaw was in complete agreement before 1 September 1939, when the Second World War began in Europe with the German provocation at Gleiwitz. Yet, Poland was the first state on the continent to sign a treaty with Hitler, and Czechoslovakia was divided by Germany with Poland after the Munich Agreement. Poland received a part of Czechoslovakia, the Tieszyn area, which is why Churchill nicknamed Poland the ‘Hyenas of Europe’*.

Now Biden caresses the Polish president’s arm. Poland buys six billion dollars worth of weapons from the United States, most notably a shipment of 250 Abrams tanks. American missile defence units will be stationed on Polish territory and 10,500 American troops have already been deployed. And by all appearances, this is not the end of the line.

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Brief Comment for context (*): this is all true, as Poland was signed a treaty of friendship with Hitler’s Germany in 1934, and after the Munich Conference (1938), Poland, with Hitler’s assent, occupied the industrial area of Teschen, now Tieszyn, which belonged to Czechoslovakia.

If you like to find out more about the 1938 betrayal, please venture over to my essay on this particularly sad episode. Here’s a primer:

There was a country that, in 1938, was ‘left alone’, if not betrayed by its ‘international partners’. That country was Czechoslovakia, which was destroyed in all but name in October 1938 by the Munich Agreement…which is to say that Czechoslovakia was left alone by none other than the British, French, and Italian governments that all worked in cahoots with Hitler.

Talk about history repeating itself.