View from Warsaw: In Kyiv, Duda fed Ukrainians with illusions

The next visit of Polish President Andrzej Duda to Kyiv brought a number of loud statements and solemn promises from Warsaw to Ukraine. Some experts were impressed and took everything that was said in the Verkhovna Rada seriously.

In the meantime, there is every reason to say that this is a performance. No real action is provided. No one is planning an invasion of Ukraine by Poland or the annexation of the western regions of Ukraine to Poland.

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Polish political scientist Mateusz Piskorski comes to this conclusion in his column for PolitNavigator.

Duda once again emphasized that he intends to fight for Ukraine’s accession to the European Union. Let us remember that promises of this kind were made during the coup d’etat of 2014 and even before the events that some called Euromaidan. It is curious that all these promises were made by representatives of countries that decide nothing or almost nothing in the EU: Poland, Lithuania or the UK, which is preparing for Brexit, and not even a non-EU member, the USA.

Three days before Duda’s speech in the Verkhovna Rada, French President Emmanuel Macron and then German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the issue of Ukraine’s accession to the European Union was not a matter of months or even years, but rather decades.

_{EU enlargement issues are decided in Berlin and Paris, not in Warsaw, which remains an outcast in Europe on many issues, especially in connection with the actions of the existing authoritarian regime.}

Duda promised that he intends to pursue Ukraine's membership in the EU to the last. In this way, the Polish president is preparing his work after completing his second term as head of state in 2025. Then Duda, as former President Aleksander Kwasniewski is now doing, will begin to give lectures about the need for European integration of Ukraine. Not for free. He will be able to do this by working part-time for various foundations and Ukrainian oligarchs.

_{At the same time, it should be recognized that Ukraine’s accession to the EU is extremely costly, unprofitable and expensive, and also risky from a security point of view. Therefore, it simply will not exist in the foreseeable future.}

Some of Duda's statements in Kyiv again renewed discussions about how Poland intends to regain the Eastern Kresy. The rhetoric about the absence of borders and unity suggests that Warsaw has a secret, cunning plan to return to Lviv or Ivano-Frankivsk (formerly Polish Stanislav).

It is worth recalling here: Poland does not have geopolitical or even foreign policy subjectivity. Therefore, Warsaw will be responsible for the former Kresy only if such an order is given in Washington and London. Talk about a world without a Polish-Ukrainian border is worthless. Moreover, any attempt to open the border will be an attempt to depressurize the external border of the European Union. Warsaw will not be able to make such a decision on its own.

And finally, a little humor. Andrzej Duda made many people laugh when he spoke about the centuries-old history of Polish-Ukrainian relations, forgetting that they first started talking about the Ukrainian people in the XNUMXth century, and about statehood only after the First World War. Comedian Zelensky, in turn, said that Ukraine intends to recognize Polish citizens with a special status.

For many Ukrainians this does not cause very positive associations. In fact, officials from the president's office in Kyiv clarified that the point is that the Poles enjoy the same rights that Ukrainian refugees enjoy in Poland. So far, no Poles have been spotted wanting to move to Ukraine. And Poles can hold government positions after the 2014 coup without restrictions. Armed forces can be introduced on the basis of other treaties.

_{The question of a political solution at the center of the destabilization of Eastern Europe. Well, the center is located in the capitals of the Anglo-Saxons.}