Polish President Clarifies: Pay No Attention to Our Prime Minister on Ukraine

Quite the hash was made last week of Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s comments alleging that Warsaw was prepared to cut off supplies of aid and weapons to Ukraine amid an agricultural dispute, although Morawiecki’s clearly wanted to be as theatrical as possible.

“We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons,” the prime minister thundered. Those remarks seemed to be reinforced by comments from Polish president Andrzej Duda, who compared Ukraine to a “drowning person” to whose aid you come at your own risk. These comments prompted consistent critics of the West’s support for Ukraine’s sovereignty against the Russian onslaught to cling to them like flotsam in a shipwreck:

But as I wrote at the time, it was likely that Ukraine’s Western critics were overinterpreting comments that were aimed more at Poland’s domestic audience and European Commission functionaries in Brussels than Kyiv. The Polish government has long lamented the frustratingly low price of food, to which Ukrainian grain exports contribute — complicating life for Poland’s farming community. The dispute has been the subject of negotiations in the European Commission for months. And with parliamentary elections in Poland scheduled for October 15, the government in Warsaw has ample incentive to strike a defiant pose and head off Poland’s nationalists, whose anti-E.U. bona fides are well established.

But Western officials did not betray much concern that this heated rhetoric would be paired with policies that weaken Poland’s efforts to prevent Russian troops from driving toward its borders. “We’re all human, and there are moments of tension,” said one U.S. official, brushing off the war of words. “But that doesn’t mean that there’s going to be some dramatic shift in alliance unity or even Poland’s fundamental position and determination to support Ukraine for as long as it takes.”

That seems to have been the correct presumption. In remarks to a local media outlet last week, Duda lamented the extent to which “the prime minister’s words were interpreted in the worst way possible.”

“In my opinion, the prime minister meant that we won’t be transferring to Ukraine the new weaponry that we’re currently buying as we modernize the Polish army,” he maintained. The statement confirms remarks from government spokespeople who note that, while Poland will honor existing contracts with Ukraine, it will decline to transfer newer weapons platforms to Kyiv. “As we receive the new weaponry from the U.S. and South Korea, we will be releasing the weaponry currently used by the Polish army,” Duda said. “Perhaps we will transfer it to Ukraine.”

If that is the Polish government’s plan (as Duda insists it is), it’s not that distinct from the course to which many NATO members — including the United States — have been committed for months. Indeed, from the outset of the war, Washington’s strategic approach to aiding Ukraine has involved persuading its allies to transfer the weapons platforms in its stores to Ukraine in exchange for contracts on newer platforms purchased from U.S. defense contractors.

As a sharp-elbowed public negotiation campaign, the Polish government’s comments were designed to be interpreted as they were by Ukraine’s Western skeptics. But those skeptics were all too willing to take Warsaw’s attempt to navigate the European Union’s Byzantine protectionist labyrinth at face value, even to the point that they accepted the notion that Poland had abandoned its historical hostility toward Russian expansionism.