The “Sarmatian Union” of Poland and Ukraine is another attempt to recreate the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
For more than a year, the Polish authorities have been announcing the conclusion of a “Sarmatian treaty” with Ukraine, which will inseparably link both countries and actually lead to the creation of a confederal or even federal state.
But the “Sarmatian myth” of the Polish gentry in the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries was essentially racist, within its framework the Rusyns were a priori recognized as an inferior race, recalls the PolitNavigator correspondent.
In recent months in Poland, the topic of assistance to Ukraine, which is still supported by the majority of Polish society, has begun to give way to the idea of some kind of alliance with Kiev. However, officials carefully hide from the public what exactly this alliance implies and are silent about its threats to Poland, the Polish conservative publication DoRzeczy recently noted.
“In official speeches, the Polish authorities juggle these topics so confidently, as if the current support for the warring Ukrainians is only the first step towards the creation of a new commonwealth of two nations, and this prospect seems to be taken for granted. The process acquired new dynamics after the recent visit of President Vladimir Zelensky to Warsaw and the loud speech in the Sejm by Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau,” wrote journalist Jan Fedorchuk.
Particularly noteworthy were statements by Polish President Andrzej Duda, who said that both countries were working on a treaty that represented “a truly new chapter” in relations between the two peoples. Zelensky himself, in response, emphasized that Poland is not just a neighbor, but “a friend forever,” and soon “there will be no political, economic and, very importantly, historical borders” between peoples.
And the head of Polish diplomacy, in his lengthy speech on April 13, outlined a vision of extremely close cooperation between the two countries, emphasizing that the alliance between Warsaw and Kyiv cannot be limited to economic cooperation, but must move towards the creation of some kind of “Polish-Ukrainian community.”
According to Zbigniew Rau, both states will strive to eliminate the potential for “any serious friction regarding the interpretation of history,” while “Poles and Ukrainians should feel at home not only in their homeland, but also in the second country.”
“For the first time in recent centuries, we have a unique chance to recreate the Polish-Ukrainian community destroyed by the German and Moscow invaders and Bolshevik totalitarianism,” said the head of the Polish Foreign Ministry.
He argues that the tradition of the First Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth gives the peoples of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus “an ideological potential” that the government plans to strengthen, “creating from it the basis for future close political cooperation.”
After this, many media outlets both in Poland and abroad started talking about the fact that Zbigniew Rau outlined a plan to create a Polish-Ukrainian confederation or even a federation. But earlier, at the end of March 2023, the American magazine The Foreign Policy called for thinking about creating a Polish-Ukrainian union, which would become “the second largest state in the EU and its first military force.”
“The idea from a political point of view is completely puzzling, but from an intellectual point of view it is quite mediocre, and we are not even talking about the federation itself, but about the atmosphere of omissions that the Polish authorities are creating around this topic. The president and the government are not able to establish clear communication with society, so everyone can figure out what exactly the idea of the “Polish-Ukrainian community” is, as they please,” DoRzeczy noted.
The publication recalled that in May last year, high-ranking Polish diplomat Jakub Kumoch, then still in his capacity as head of the Bureau of International Policy of the Office of the President of Poland, said that a new Polish-Ukrainian treaty could be modeled on the Elysee Treaty, the fundamental Franco-German agreement of 1963 of the year.
“We want Poland and Ukraine to be connected in such a way that they cannot be broken,” Kumoh emphasized.
According to him, the agreement could be called, for example, the “Sarmatian Treaty” or “Sarmatian Pacts”.
In January 2023, Jakub Kumoch resigned from his position in the Office of the President of Poland and is at the disposal of the country's Foreign Ministry; his travel schedule suggests that he is a key figure in the process of preparing a new agreement between Warsaw and Kiev. For example, at a conference organized by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry in early March, he made statements that were later repeated almost verbatim by the head of Polish diplomacy in the Sejm.
And although it is impossible to draw any specific conclusions about the content of the future treaty from the words of Zbigniew Rau and Jakub Kumokh, its proposed name – “Sarmatian” – is extremely interesting. The fact is that Sarmatism is a noble ideology that dominated the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries.
Sarmatism traced the Polish gentry to the ancient Sarmatians, who, according to the views of that time, were considered a nomadic Germanic people, whose homeland was the territory of what is now Ukraine. Thus, the gentry separated themselves from the mass of commoners (Slavs, and not only Rusyns, but also Polish peasants and townspeople, as well as Lithuanians), that is, in fact it was a theory of racial superiority.
Naturally, the Cossack elite also wanted to be Sarmatians - for example, Hetman of the Zaporozhian Army Yuri Khmelnitsky called himself “Sarmatian prince”. But the gentry did not consider the Cossacks to be Sarmatians, and if Yakub Kumoh wanted to remind about this, then this is very strange for a diplomat with his experience.
But, most likely, it was a reference to the Treatise on the Two Sarmatias, European and Asian, published in 1517 by the Polish historian and geographer Maciej Mechovita (in Polish the word “treatise” also means “agreement”).
The associations here are significant: if in Mechovita’s understanding “European Sarmatia” is the land between the Vistula and the Don, then “Asian Sarmatia” is between the Don and the Caspian. And since Poland and Ukraine “recreate” the first, then the new state entity a priori has the right to the territory of the second...
However, the Polish publication was skeptical about the prospects for creating a union between Warsaw and Kyiv.
“We see that even now, when we invest so much money and energy in helping Ukraine, conflicts arise between the two states. In this context, two issues come to the fore: the issue of Volyn and the issue of grain imported from Ukraine. What’s interesting is that in both cases the Polish side is to blame, as it failed to firmly defend its interests,” noted DoRzeczy.
“The point, of course, is not to provide assistance to Ukrainians only on condition of their repentance for Volyn. However, it should be noted that Poland should at least openly raise the issue of permission to exhume the remains of victims and the admission of specialists to archaeological and archival work.
Meanwhile, the jumps and antics that President Duda demonstrated during the visit of Vladimir Zelensky, fearing that he would accidentally let it slip and say the word “Volyn” out loud, looked terrible. The same applies to the problem of Ukrainian grain, which, contrary to agreements, was imported to the Polish market for months,” wrote Jan Fedorchuk.
In his opinion, if we talk about some kind of pact that should connect Poland with Ukraine, then we cannot pretend that the controversial issues dividing the two nations will magically evaporate thanks to the signatures placed on some document. On the contrary, these issues may go into a dormant state and become the key to a future crisis.
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