The ground war in Ukraine has run its course, a new phase is beginning. Even diehard supporters of Ukraine in the western media and think tanks are admitting that a military victory over Russia is impossible and a vacation of the territory under Russian control is way beyond Kiev’s capability.
Hence the ingenuity of the Biden Administration to explore Plan B counselling Kiev to be realistic about loss of territory and pragmatically seek dialogue with Moscow. This was the bitter message that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken transmitted to Kiev recently in person.
But President Zelensky’s caustic reaction in a subsequent interview with the Economist magazine is revealing. He hit back that the western leaders still talk the good talk, pledging they will stand with Ukraine “as long as it takes” (Biden mantra), but he, Zelensky, has detected a change of mood among some of his partners: “I have this intuition, reading, hearing and seeing their eyes [when they say] ‘we’ll be always with you.’ But I see that he or she is not here, not with us.” Certainly, Zelensky is reading the body language right, as in the absence of an overwhelming military success shortly, western support for Ukraine is time-limited.
Zelensky knows that sustaining the western support will be difficult. Yet he hopes that if not Americans, European Union will at least keep supplying aid, and but may open negotiations over the accession process for Ukraine possibly even at its summit in December. But he also held out a veiled threat of terrorist threat to Europe — warning that it would not be a “good story” for Europe if it were to “drive these people [of Ukraine] into a corner”. So far such ominous threats were muted, originating from low ranking activists of the fascist Bandera fringe.
But Europe has its limits, too. The western stockpiles of weapons are exhausted and Ukraine is a bottomless pit. Importantly, conviction is lacking whether continued supplies would make any difference to the proxy war that is unwinnable. Besides, European economies are in doldrum,’ the recession in Germany may slide into depression, with profound consequences of “deindustrialisation.”
Suffice to say, Zelensky’s visit to the White House in the coming days becomes a defining moment. The Biden Administration is in a sombre mood that the proxy war is hindering a full-throttle Indo-Pacific strategy against China. Yet, during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, Blinken explicitly stated for the first time that the US would not oppose Ukraine using US-supplied longer-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory, a move that Moscow has previously called a “red line,” which would make Washington a direct party to the conflict.
The well-known American military historian, strategic thinker and combat veteran Colonel (Retd.) Douglas MacGregor (who served as advisor to the Pentagon during the Trump administration), is prescient when he says that a new “Biden’s phase of the war” is about to begin. That is to say, having run out of ground forces, the locus will now shift to long-range strike weapons like the Storm Shadow, Taurus, ATACMS long-range missiles, etc.
The US is considering sending ATACMS long-range missiles that Ukraine has been asking for a long time with the capability to strike deep inside Russian territory. The most provocative part is that NATO reconnaissance platforms, both manned and unmanned, will be used in such operations, making the US a virtual co-belligerent.
Russia has been exercising restraint in attacking the source of such enemy capabilities but how long such restraint will continue is anybody’s guess. In response to a pointed query about how Washington would see the attacks on Russian territory with American weaponry and technology, Blinken argued that the increasing number of attacks on Russian territory by Ukrainian drones are “about how they’re [Ukrainians] going to defend their territory and how they’re working to take back what’s been seized from them. Our [US] role, the role of dozens of other countries around the world that are supporting them, is to help them do that.”
Russia is not going to accept such a brazen escalation, especially as these advanced weapon systems used to attack Russia are actually manned by NATO personnel — contractors, trained ex-military hands or even serving officers. President Putin told the media on Friday that “we have detected foreign mercenaries and instructors both on the battlefield and in the units where training is carried out. I think yesterday or the day before yesterday someone was captured again.”
The US calculus is that at some point, Russia will be compelled to negotiate and a frozen conflict will ensue where the NATO allies would retain the option to continue with Ukraine’s military build-up and the process leading to its membership of the Atlantic alliance, and allow the Biden Administration to focus on the Indo-Pacific.
However, Russia will not settle for a “frozen conflict” that falls far short of the objectives of demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine that are the key objectives of its special military operation.
Faced with this new phase of the proxy war, what form the Russian retaliation will take remains to be seen. There could be multiple ways without Russia directly attacking NATO territories or using nuclear weapons (unless the US stages a nuclear attack — of which the chances are zero as of now.)
Already, it is possible to see the potential resumption of military-technical cooperation between Russia and the DPRK (potentially including ICBM technology) as a natural consequence of the aggressive US policy towards Russia and its support for Ukraine — as much as of the current international situation. The point is, today it is with DPRK; tomorrow it could be with Iran, Cuba or Venezuela — what Col. MacGregor calls “horizontal escalation” by Moscow. The situation in Ukraine has become interconnected with the problems of the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan.
Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said on state television on Wednesday that Russia has “no other options” but to achieve a victory in its special military operation and will continue to make progress with their key mission of mowing down the enemy’s equipment and personnel. This suggests that the attritional war will be further intensified while the overall strategy may shift to achieving total military victory.
The Ukrainian military is desperate for manpower. In the 15-week “counteroffensive” alone, over 71,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. There is talk of Kiev seeking repatriation of its nationals in military age from among the refugees in Europe. On the other hand, in expectation of a prolonged conflict, the mobilisation in Russia is continuing.
Putin disclosed on Friday that 300,000 people have volunteered and signed contracts to join the armed forces and new units are being formed, equipped with advanced types of weapons and equipment, “and some of them are already 85–90 percent equipped.”
The high likelihood is that once the Ukrainian “counteroffensive” peters out in another few weeks as a massive failure, Russian forces may launch a large-scale offensive. Conceivably, Russian forces may even cross Dnieper river and take control of Odessa and the coastline leading to the Romanian border, from where NATO has been mounting attacks on Crimea. Make no mistake, for the Anglo-American axis, encircling Russia in the Black Sea has always remained a top priority.
Watch the excellent interview (below) of Col. Douglas MacGregor by Professor Glenn Diesen at the University of North-Eastern in Norway:
Eighteen months into the war in Ukraine the breathless hype that characterised early media coverage has curdled into doom. This is the deepest trough of despair that the wartime media has entered yet: the past month of reporting has given us new admissions about a war that increasingly appears to be locked in bloody stalemate, along with a portrait of Ukraine and its leadership shorn of the rote glorification and hero worship of the conflict’s early days. The deadlock has increasingly resembled brutal, unabating, First World War-style combat, with the Ukrainian army rapidly depleting artillery ammunition supplied by the West. Distant audiences, who always treated the war as a team sport, and Ukraine as an underdog defying the odds against a larger aggressor, are thinning out; surely many will soon turn their attention to the partisan conflict of the forthcoming US presidential election. Optimists say the change in the media’s tone is indicative of little more than the inevitable pendulum swings of war and that Ukraine may yet emerge victorious. But such a view elides a host of unavoidable realities.
At the centre of this cascade of disappointment lies Ukraine’s poor performance in the overhyped “spring counteroffensive”, which arrived several months late. Boosters in the press set expectations so high that Ukraine was practically set up for failure. “We’re about to see what a decentralised, horizontal, innovative high-tech force can do,” Jessica Berlin, a German and American political analyst, wrote in May. “Ukraine may be underfunded, undermanned and underequipped compared to Russia. But those tactical, adaptive Ukrainian strengths deliver what money can’t buy and training can’t teach. Get ready for some stunners.” In the DailyTelegraph, the soldier-turned-civilian-military-expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was effusive as recently as June: “As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain: Putin’s demoralised conscripts are utterly unprepared for the shock action now hitting their lines.”
But by most accounts, the counteroffensive has been a profound letdown. A Washington Post article published on 17 August cited a classified assessment by the US intelligence community which said that Ukraine’s counteroffensive would “fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol”, meaning that Kyiv “would not fulfil its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea”. Other analyses have testified to the same. As Roland Popp, strategic analyst at the Swiss Military Academy at ETH Zurich told me, “The main cause for the change in [the media’s] tune is certainly general disappointment about Ukrainian military performance in the much-anticipated ‘counteroffensive’. Military experts in Western think tanks had whipped up high expectations based on Ukrainian successes in Kharkiv and Kherson last year. They ignored the Russian ability to adapt – which is historically the main factor explaining the changing odds during wars – and overstated the effects of Western weapons technology and doctrine.”
It is said that “success has a hundred fathers but failure is an orphan”, and a rush to allocate blame for the underwhelming counteroffensive is now under way. Some Western military experts blame the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ failures on its “Soviet legacy”. And several recent articles have condemned Ukraine for refusing to follow US instruction. “The thinly disguised criticism of Ukrainian operational decision-making is also intended to distract from [their] own misjudgments,” Popp said. American officials have complained through media that Ukraine has focused too much on the city of Bakhmut and other points in the East, wasting Western-furnished artillery in crushing barrages, and asserted that Kyiv should concentrate its forces in an area around Tokmak in the south of the country and its artillery fire only on the most important targets. Through unnamed sources and leaks to the press, a story of a more frustrated US-Ukraine relationship has emerged in recent weeks. “We built up this mountain of steel for the counteroffensive. We can’t do that again,” one disappointed former US official is quoted as telling the Washington Post. “It doesn’t exist.”
“They are clearly trying to show some distance from Ukraine’s decision-making even as the official line is ‘we’re with them 100 per cent’,” Ben Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank, said. The Ukrainian side, on the other hand, blames the West for its reluctance to furnish it with weapons and supplies. To cite but one of many examples communicated through the press, an anonymous source in the general staff recently told the Economist that Ukraine had received just 60 Leopard tanks despite having been promised hundreds. Adding to the irritation was the disappointment at the Nato summit in Vilnius in July, where Ukraine was not granted a much hoped-for timeline for accession to the military alliance. Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, responded to the news in a series of furious tweets, calling the decision “unprecedented and absurd”.
But the stage was set for these deflated hopes in the war’s first weeks in 2022. Early on, reporters framed the war as one of David vs Goliath, in which Ukrainian grandmothers downed Russian drones with jars of pickles. Ukraine’s astonishing performance in Kharkiv fuelled expectations. Early mythmaking has made recent disappointments all the more bitter. “There were wishful expectations that Russia would collapse, fold early on, especially after Ukraine heroically survived the first round, and people got carried away,” Patrick Porter, the realist scholar of international relations, said.
Compounding the disillusionment is the fact that the early shock of the war has worn off, meaning it’s lost some of its initial sense of urgency – especially as war takes its toll far beyond Ukraine. “There was the initial widespread feeling of revulsion; then, people were naturally drawn towards ‘we must not compromise’, and moral and strategic maximalism,” Porter said. “That’s easier to hold when you’re not yet feeling the pain. Now, materially, there are costs everywhere.” And while the immediate convulsion of fear that accompanied the full-scale invasion was so strong that it prompted Sweden and Finland to apply to join Nato, the initial panic has since faded, and evolved into a more ambient dread about a long war of attrition, rising inflation, recession and food insecurity.
Recently, Ukraine itself has also been depicted in a more complicated light. On 19 August the New York Times published a story about Kyiv’s wartime policy of jailing conscientious objectors. Meanwhile, Zelensky’s new proposal to equate corruption with treason, transferring cases from anti-graft agencies to the security service, was met with unusually harsh condemnation in Politico. And this summer both the Guardian and BBC have published articles about Ukrainian deserters and men employing other means to avoid conscription, including barricading themselves inside their homes and using Telegram channels to warn other men about the location of roving military recruitment officials. On 24 February 2022 a presidential decree imposed martial law which forbade men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving Ukraine. But according to a BBC report in June this year, tens of thousands of men have crossed the Romanian border alone, and at least 90 men have died attempting to make the perilous crossing, either freezing to death in the mountains or by drowning in the Tisa River.
Further, the Economist recently published an article about the Ukrainian public’s waning morale. Most men eager to defend Ukraine joined the armed forces long ago, and many are now dead. The country now recruits among those effectively forced. Individually, stories about conscientious objectors, deserters, those hiding from conscription, and a war-weary public can appear anecdotal, but taken together, they begin to undermine one of the foundational tenets of the war: that Ukrainians want to fight, in the words of Joe Biden, the US president, “for as long as it takes”. And as expectations are dramatically scaled back, one cannot help but ask: for as long as it takes to do what?
As a more sober reality sets in, it’s worth asking why Western governments and the media were such effusive boosters of Ukraine’s war effort. The writer Richard Seymour has suggested that part of it was about identity formation, wherein Ukraine is emblematic of an “idealised Europe” or even democracy itself, while Russia represents Oriental despotism and authoritarianism. The war thus embodies the supposed civilisational struggle theorised by Samuel Huntington between democracies and autocracies, promoted by the Biden administration through initiatives such as its Summit for Democracy. That annual event aims to “renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad”, underlining the continuity between liberal opposition to the putative authoritarian affinities of Donald Trump and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
But beyond the merely symbolic there was a practical rationale for the kinds of coverage we saw in the war’s early months: the conflict in Ukraine has revived a waning Atlanticism – a long-sought aim of proponents of Nato enlargement. Just a few years ago Emmanuel Macron, the French president, declared Nato “braindead”; the war in Ukraine has brought it back to life. Finland and Sweden applied to join. Critics say that the governments of both countries used “shock doctrine” tactics to convince their respective populations to abandon their policy of neutrality, making the decision to apply for membership while the war was top news and the public was still afraid.
Some have wondered whether the media’s shift in tone – and all the anonymous messages transmitted by official US sources – presage an imminent change in policy: negotiations, a peace settlement, or ceasefire. But most experts agree that it is still too early for that. “Russia’s invasion has been a particularly brutal war, one with many atrocities,” Porter explained. “Ukrainians are unlikely to accept peace negotiations yet.” For both Russia and Ukraine, the war is a primal one, and nowhere near its end. But the new crop of articles does mark a return of a sceptical tone largely suppressed until recently. In November last year General Mark A Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, proposed a negotiated settlement to the war. Following Ukraine’s successes in Kharkiv and Kherson, he asserted that “you want to negotiate from a position of strength” and that “Russia right now is on its back”. The Biden administration promptly distanced itself from the idea. Publicly, the US pledged support for Ukraine’s total victory, but privately, many in the administration were said to have shared Milley’s scepticism. Late last month, some in media started revisiting the general’s remarks, suggesting that perhaps he had been right all along.
Realists, most infamously John Mearsheimer, who are highly controversial among liberal boosters of Ukraine, have long warned of the dangers of the exalted rhetoric and mythmaking among Western governments and media. In an op-ed for Politico published in spring 2022, Porter, along with the grand strategy experts Friedman and Justin Logan, cautioned against the risk of “giving Ukraine false hope”, and stressed that “the rhetoric-policy gap could also raise excessive Ukrainian expectations of support”. Eighteen months into the war, with a dejected Zelensky chastising Nato for insufficient support, their unheeded warnings look prescient.
Instead of total victory, at summer’s end the media now appears to be girding the Western public for a long, protracted war of attrition. The editorial board of the Washington Post, citing US statistics of nearly half a million killed or injured, recently cautioned that “no end to the carnage is in sight, and calls for a negotiated solution are wishful thinking at this point”. The editorial asserts grimly that “the war could continue for years – waxing, waning or frozen”. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies has also recently warned that “the most probable outcome… is a war of attrition that has no clear outcome or time limit”. Le Monde also reported that in July a French general, Jacques Langlade de Montgros, warned that the conflict in Ukraine “is a war of attrition, set for the long term” like “two boxers in a ring, exhausting each other blow by blow, not knowing which one will call first”.
Also hanging over the grim media coverage is the 2024 US presidential election. “The Biden administration now has the difficult task of convincing the public that an attritional approach, that is, opting for a long war, can still lead to some kind of Ukrainian victory or at least a standstill in order to maintain support for continued financial and military assistance for Ukraine,” Popp said. The war in Ukraine has polarised US public opinion. According to a recent poll by CNN, 71 per cent of Republicans are against new funding for Ukraine; among Democrats, 62 per cent support it. Significantly, the war has also divided the Republican Party. At the first Republican presidential candidate debate on 23 August, the cracks in the party were on full display: the insurgent populist right, embodied in the millennial figure of Vivek Ramaswamy, hopes to see such aid diminished or eliminated entirely, while more conventional Republicans like Chris Christie and former vice-president Mike Pence expressed a commitment to continuing it. Ramaswamy said: “I think that this is disastrous, that we are protecting against an invasion across somebody else’s border, when we should use those same military resources to prevent… the invasion of our own southern border here in the United States of America.” He also mocked American deference to Zelensky, referring to him as some politicians’ “pope” to whom they paid pilgrimage while ignoring domestic catastrophes. Trump, who was not on the debate stage, called for an end to the war in an interview with Tucker Carlson, saying “that’s a war that should end immediately, not because of one side or the other, because hundreds of thousands of people are being killed”. And now, it appears that most Republicans agree with the positions of the populist candidates: 59 per cent say they believe that the US has “already done enough to support Kyiv”.
But for some, hope is not yet lost. There is new talk of a “reset” of Ukrainian strategy. In a Washington Post op-ed co-authored by David Petraeus, a retired US army general, and Frederick W Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute, readers were cautioned against excess pessimism. The authors argued that major breakthroughs could happen at any moment, and that Ukraine is indeed making slow, steady progress, field by field. Those with similarly optimistic views argue that the media always vacillates wildly between unrealistic claims of imminent victory and maudlin pronunciations about catastrophic losses, both territorial and human, and the spectre of a war without end. But that the increasingly exhausted public – in Ukraine and the West – will be eager to accede to more war with the same enthusiasm it did in the war’s early months appears less likely by the hour.
Lily Lynch is a writer and editor-in-chief of Balkanist Magazine.
About an hour after air raid sirens sounded in the early hours of 10 August, residents on Yaroslavska Street in the heart of Kyiv’s hip Podil district heard the crash of a building coming down.
Some looked out of their windows expecting to see the smoking remains of a Russian missile. Instead, in the dawn light, two excavators were tearing apart an elegant 200-year-old mansion.
Within hours, the house, built in 1811, was a pile of rubble. Protesters gathered outside with placards attacking developers and the city’s government. “What hasn’t been destroyed by the Russian rockets is being destroyed by our officials and builders,” read one placard.
The war, perhaps surprisingly, has not diminished the appetite for prime property in Kyiv, or halted the scramble to get hold of empty plots for construction. Property prices dipped only briefly when Russian forces besieged the city last spring, then rebounded as its streets returned to life. Kyiv has extensive air defences and the frontlines are far away, so some residents have returned, and it has become a new home for people fleeing the fighting further east.
Ksenia Semenova, a city council member who focuses on protecting historic Kyiv, said she got her first post-invasion call about an illegal demolition on 25 February 2022, the day after Russia launched missiles at the capital and sent its troops across the border.
“The developers told me: ‘We thought it was a good idea – lots of people had left Kyiv so we wouldn’t disturb anyone’s work or sleep’,” she said.
But while developers seek to take advantage of Russia’s invasion, it has also spurred opposition to their plans. Vladimir Putin’s ahistorical attempt at justifying the war by denying Ukraine’s national identity has bolstered support for activists fighting to protect the city’s built heritage.
“After the full-scale invasion, when Russia said we are not a real country and don’t have any history, cultural heritage became more important to people,” said Semenova.
Perhaps because of that heightened appreciation for Ukrainian history, the August destruction of the building in Podil caused an outcry. Mayor Vitali Klitschko has pledged to investigate and the property’s owner uploaded a defiant video to YouTube.
Relaxing on a sofa and waving documents that he claimed backed his position, Serhiy Boyarchukov said he plans to build four storeys of apartment hotels and a “clubhouse” where the elegant single-storey house – a rare example of residential wooden construction in the city – had stood.
“There was no complete demolition, there was a partial dismantling, and the basement and one wall stayed in place,” he said, adding that the work was authorised under a “reconstruction permit” issued by the culture ministry in March.
He did not address questions about why the demolition began at 5am during an air raid alert.
Activists are sceptical the mayor’s investigation will really hold anyone to account. They say that for years, city authorities have allowed Kyiv’s historic fabric to be sold off, torn down or decay beyond the point of repair.
Oleh Symoroz was a veteran of that peaceful struggle before he volunteered to fight for Kyiv, then went east when the city had been saved and lost his legs on the frontline in the east of Ukraine.
Now back home for rehab care, he was furious to find the city being destroyed from the inside while many of the people who campaigned to protect it are serving on the frontlines.
“I feel terrible this destruction is happening now. Worse than I did about it before the full-scale invasion,” he said, in an interview at the hospital where he is learning to walk again with prosthetic limbs. “We are away fighting for Ukraine, and they use this chance to destroy the city.
“There are not so many construction bosses on the frontline, but a lot of activists have been killed or injured or badly traumatised.” He added: “They have an advantage now.”
Another resident, Tetiana, expected city authorities would help when a Russian drone hit flats in her building on Zhylyanska Street, a few blocks from Kyiv’s main railway station. It killed four of her neighbours, including a woman who was six months pregnant, and demolished the hall and staircase leading to her door.skip past newsletter promotion
She was traumatised and frightened by the attack, but was not worried about being made homeless. She had seen politicians on the news visiting other buildings hit by Russian attacks and promising to help, and the reconstruction that rapidly followed.
So Tetiana was stunned to get a message just three days later announcing that her building had been declared structurally unsound and would have to be demolished. The attached survey was dated 17 October, the day of the attack.
“When could the person responsible for that report have done it?” she said. “The sun set just after six, which is around when the firefighters finished putting out flames, and curfew was at 9pm then.”
The surviving residents were urged to sign away the rights to their historic flats in the city centre. In return, they would be put on a waiting list for new homes on the outskirts of Kyiv about 12 miles away.
Tetiana refused, marking the start of a bureaucratic nightmare that has left her homeless – staying with friends and relatives – for nearly a year.
When her fellow survivors tried to register a residents’ association – a key step to getting their own survey and protecting the site of their building – they were rejected 15 times by city authorities on technicalities.
Tetiana, who asked to be identified only by her first name because of the stress of the long battle with city authorities, now believes officials want to use the damage caused on 17 October as an excuse to demolish her building and seize the land.
“What the Russians began, the city council is trying to finish off,” she said. “Even if our building isn’t sound, I don’t understand why they can’t use the money to rebuild. Why do they want to move us away and what do they plan to do with the land?”
Asked about the building, Kyiv’s city authorities only said: “The house cannot be reconstructed.” They declined to answer questions about why the building was not on the register of damaged objects, how they had been able to carry out the survey in a single day and why residents were being asked to move to the city’s outskirts.
Tetiana is determined to reclaim her flat and protect the historic property, but is braced for a long battle.
“There are a lot of old people in this building – maybe the Kyiv authorities thought: ‘Let’s wait and maybe they will die and the problem will be resolved.’ They didn’t take into account that there are still young people who decided to fight for their rights.”
Both parties are in a dilemma whereby each believes that they have more to gain at the level of national and political interests by escalating tensions than by being the first to de-escalate them. A self-sustaining cycle is thus in the process of forming, which risks leading to such a drastic deterioration of their ties that the presently dismal state thereof might soon be looked fondly upon.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s revelation to local media on Wednesday that his country had stopped supplying arms to Ukraine in favor of arming itself showed just how far bilateral ties have plunged over the past week. Warsaw unilaterally extended restrictions on its eastern neighbor’s agricultural imports upon the expiry of the European Commission’s deal on 15 September in order to protect its farmers, which prompted Kiev to complain to the WTO about it on Monday.
Later that same day, Polish government spokesman Piotr Muller suggested that Warsaw might let its aid to Ukrainian refugees lapse next spring instead of extending it, thus hinting at a willingness to expand their trade dispute into other dimensions. If that happens, then the over one and a half million Ukrainians temporarily residing in Poland would either have to return home or go to elsewhere to Germany for instance. Everything then snowballed into a full-blown political crisis on Tuesday.
Polish Minister of European Affairs Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek ominously warned that:
“Ukraine’s actions make no impression on us… but they do make a certain impression on Polish public opinion. This can be seen in the polls, in the level of public support for continued support for Ukraine. And this harms Ukraine itself. We would like to continue supporting Ukraine, but, for this to be possible, we must have the support of Poles in this matter. If we don’t have it, it will be difficult for us to continue supporting Ukraine in the same way as we have been doing so far.”
Zelensky then exploited his global pulpit at the UNGA to fearmonger about the following:
“We are working to ensure food stability. And I hope that many of you will join us in these efforts. We launched a temporary sea export corridor from our ports. And we are working hard to preserve the land routes for grain exports. And it is alarming to see how some in Europe, some of our friends in Europe, play out solidarity in a political theater – making a thriller from the grain. They may seem to play their own role but in fact they are helping set the stage to a Moscow actor.”
Polish President Andrzej Duda’s response that he shared with reporters showed how offended he was:
“Ukraine is behaving like a drowning person clinging to everything he can… but we have the right to defend ourselves against harm being done to us. A drowning person is extremely dangerous, he can pull you down to the depths… simply drown the rescuer. We must act to protect ourselves from the harm being done to us, because if the drowning person… drowns us, he will not get help. So we have to take care of our interests and we will do it effectively and decisively.”
It was against this backdrop that Poland urgently summoned the Ukrainian Ambassador on Wednesday, after which Morawiecki revealed later that day that Poland is no longer sending weapons to Kiev. Prior to Ukraine complaining to the WTO about Poland, which is what set this fast-moving sequence of events into motion, tensions were already boiling for some time as a result of the failed counteroffensive sobering them up from the mutual delusion of seemingly inevitable victory over Russia.
These neighboring nations then naturally began to fall out with one another as the full range of their preexisting differences were exacerbated and quickly reshaped bilateral relations. Their trade dispute was just the tip of the iceberg but it showed that each side was starting to prioritize their contradictory national interests at the expense of shared political ones. This signaled to their societies that it was now once again acceptable target the other with nationalist rage instead of focusing solely on Russia.
All this have been prevented, however, if only Ukraine showed some gratefulness to Poland for everything that Warsaw did for it these past 19 months and didn’t complain to the WTO about the grain issue. Even worse was Zelensky breaking the taboo of accusing his Polish counterpart of all people, who leads one of the world’s most Russophobic states in history, of supposedly doing Russia’s geopolitical bidding. He crossed a red line and there’s now no going back to their previously illusory mutual trust.
Polish-Ukrainian ties are expected to plunge even further in the coming weeks as the first approaches its next elections on 15 October, which the ruling “Law & Justice” (PiS) party hopes to win by making everything about national security. This explains why they cut off arms shipments to Ukraine in response to Zelensky’s ridiculous innuendo about Poland being a Russian puppet, and it’s possible that more such meaningful moves might soon follow to remind Ukraine that it’s indebted to Poland for its survival.
With these calculations in mind, it can confidently be predicted that Polish-Ukrainian ties will likely continue plunging till mid-October at the earliest, after which they might rebound if the “Civic Platform” (PO) opposition’s latest media campaign succeeds in turning enough rural voters against PiS. It’ll be an uphill battle for them, and PiS could possibly form a coalition government with the anti-establishmentConfederation party if they aren’t totally trounced, so PO’s return to power isn’t guaranteed.
That being the case, there’s a credible chance that Polish-Ukrainian ties could plunge even further across the coming year, especially if PiS is forced into a coalition government with Confederation. The first has come to resent Zelensky in recent months while the latter was consistently against Poland’s leading role in waging NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine, which could lead to a devastating combination for Kiev. In such a situation, everything might get much worse, and at an even faster pace at that.
Absent PO’s victory at the polls next month, the only other variable that could realistically offset this scenario is if Kiev backtracks on its threatened WTO lawsuit and Zelensky finally shows sincere gratitude in public for everything that Poland has done for Ukraine. Nobody should get their hopes up about that, however, since he’s expected to seek re-election next spring and might worry that walking back on his newly assertive policy towards Poland could lose him the nationalist vote.
Both parties are therefore in a dilemma whereby each believes that they have more to gain at the level of national and political interests by escalating tensions than by being the first to de-escalate them. A self-sustaining cycle is thus in the process of forming, which risks leading to such a drastic deterioration of their ties that the presently dismal state thereof might soon be looked fondly upon. This is especially so if Poland moves to more openly exert its creeping hegemony over Western Ukraine in the near future.
To be clear, the aforementioned sequence of events is the absolute worst-case scenario and accordingly isn’t all that likely, but it also can’t be ruled out either since few foresaw how far their ties would plunge just a few short months ago. It’s undeniable that Polish-Ukrainian relations have entered a period of uncertainty that might last for a while so both would do well to prepare their societies for the possibility of continued tensions so that they can most effectively adapt to this emerging geostrategic reality.
The majority of Russians view their country and China as “great,” but would not say the same of the U.S. or its allies, according to Levada Center polling. The share of Russians who view their own country as great has almost doubled over the past two decades, from 43% in 2002 to 80% in 2023. The same period has seen the share of Levada respondents who view China as great triple from 19% in 2002 to 63% in 2023. By comparison, the share of Russians who view the U.S. as great halved from 62% in 2002 to 30% in 2023. The same period saw the share of Russians who view Japan, the U.K., Germany and France as great shrink at an even faster rate, ending at 9%, 9%, 8% and 3%, respectively, in 2023. Interestingly, while the share of Russians who admire Western greatness has shrunk dramatically over the past two decades, shorter-term measurements reveal certain improvements in Russians’ views toward some of these countries. For instance, the share of Russians who say they have a good attitude toward the U.S. was 22% in August 2023, which is higher than at any other point since February 2022.
