There is widespread fear of Russia in Poland, which would again want to dominate Polish lands. Some, for political purposes utilizing ancient anti-Russian sentiments, even set limits to this future Russian partition, which, this time, would scope the Vistula. The grounds for specified a scare of Poles were declassified old operational plans of the Polish army, which, in the case of aggression from the east, allowed to retreat behind the Vistula and only then, after the allies had joined, the name regained the lost areas.
These, out of date today, operational plans were created in times many years before the present war in Ukraine, which makes drawing political conclusions today, based on them, not convincing.
The facts are that people from the highest circles of power in Russia do not make territorial claims against Poland, but on the contrary, as late president Putin, guarantee that Poland will not be attacked, but in the event that it hit Russia first. Of course, political assurances have this value that they concern a peculiar situation and, with the change of the arrangement of forces, may besides be modified. However, the current state is that Russia is not sending us any circumstantial territorial claims.
In fact, the Russian leaders make it clear, on many occasions, that Poland would be in favour of joining any of the lands that are now part of Ukraine.
The first of this kind of signal, which caused quite a few confusion, was the information of Minister Radek Sikorski, from his interview for Politico, that during Prime Minister Tusk's visit to Moscow in 2008, president Putin was to propose to Tusk the city of Lviv: “Russia wanted us to join the partition of Ukraine.(...) That was 1 of the first things my prime minister Donald Tusk told Putin. He then stated that Ukraine is an artificially created country, that Lviv is simply a Polish city, and that we could solve this together. Fortunately, Tusk did not respond. He knew it was being recorded.”
Some hints about the affiliation of Lviv and Vilnius were besides to be made by Putin during his visit to Poland in 2009.
After the start of the crisis in Ukraine in 2014, Vladimir Zyrinski proposed to Poland "five western circuits of Ukraine".
And rather recently, during the youth festival in Sochi, the erstwhile president and current deputy chief of the safety Council of the Russian Federation, Dmitri Medvedev, appeared against the background of a map of Ukraine divided so that 7 western circuits of that country were shown as a part of Poland.
One might gag that since Poland did not respond positively to the proposal to join 5 circuits, they added 2 more to make its offer attractive. What is worth noting, despite specified a crucial shift of the Polish border to the east still, in this project, would not be a direct border with Russia, but only through any another buffer territories.
The full thing should be treated in the category of political fiction, or possibly more of a provocation. The first origin of this presentation may be similar, published in the West, maps showing the division of Russia's territory. The difference, however, is that in the West it is done by private individuals or non-governmental organisations, and here, however, we have a first-rate Russian policy that is based on specified a map.
It should besides be noted that according to this Russian task to divide Ukraine, its main part, including Odessa and the full Black Sea coast, would gotta fall to Russia itself, and smaller parts of Poland, Romania and Hungary. The 7 circuits that Russia "excellently" wants us to offer a full of 140 1000 square kilometres, which would mean that the full area of our enlarged country would grow to 455,000 square kilometres, making it the sixth country in Europe erstwhile it is only eleven today.
However, any specified reckoning should be treated as a gag today, but it is not known how the future will turn out, and if Russia were truly able to occupy the permanent majority of Ukraine's territory, then in fact this remaining part, deprived of access to the sea, would have large difficulties to be as an independent state.
Then, which cannot be excluded, the inhabitants of these western circuits of present Ukraine themselves could want to join Poland, in the form of a federation or confederation.
And then Poles would face a dilemma whether to agree to specified a Polish-Ukrainian state creation. There are very many indications that we should disagree, especially given the negative, in this regard, historical experience.
In the 16th century, before the conclusion of the Lublin Union and the connection of the large territories presently part of Ukraine, Poland, in terms of civilizational development, did not disagree much from the level of Western European countries. shortly after the conclusion of the Lublin Union, serious problems began, which gradually degraded our state in all respect: political, social, spiritual conflicts, Cossack uprisings, which ended with the actual collapse of the Republic of Poland after the Chmielnicki uprising. The last paroxysm of all these bad consequences of the union was the Volyn massacre. We've been through this road erstwhile before, and it doesn't make any sense to join her again.
Stanisław Lewicki
