Poland's threat assessment: deepened, not changed

ENPolish-Russian relations are traditionally difficult, shaped by geostrategic locations in Europe and shared history. Russians have stereotypes about Poland that color their perception of Polish issues. This, combined with ongoing political and economic disputes, creates a situation where hopes for improvement are slim. Poland and Russia’s common history includes a number of painful historical memories that make it challenging to build mutual trust and reconciliation, which outside observers must understand. Although the two nations have been neighbors for more than a thousand years, the critical historical events came between the 16th and 17th centuries, when both countries competed for primacy in Eastern Europe. Poland lost this rivalry, resulting in Austria, Prussia, and Russia partitioning Poland three times between 1772 and 1795, when Russia made Poland a principality within the Russian empire until Poland’s independence in 1918. The result was the compulsory Russification of Polish lands, widespread attempts to convert Catholic Poles to Orthodox Christianity, and the brutal suppression of national uprisings. Together, these meet the modern criteria for ethnic cleansing and form the basis of Poles’ historical consciousness. When Soviet forces sought to invade Europe in the name of communism at the end of the Russian Civil War, they were decisively defeated at the Battle of Warsaw in 1920, which stopped the Soviet advance and frustrated their desire to ignite a global revolution. Stalin, then an officer in the Red Army, was one of the contributors to this disaster and took his revenge in 1940, ordering the execution of some 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia at Katyń, after partitioning Poland again with Germany.The Soviets occupied Poland at the end of World War II and imposed a communist regime until 1989, depriving Poland of full political and economic sovereignty, creating elite dependence on the Soviet Union, and enabling Soviet interference in Poland’s internal affairs. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ascent of the Law and Justice Party in Poland in 2015 led to a more decisive and negative policy toward Russia. According to Witold Waszczykowski, a former member of Poland’s Parliament and a current member of the European Parliament, NATO’s Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation, enacted at a time when “Yeltsin’s Russia was relatively weak and cooperative with the West,” was repudiated in acknowledgment that “Today’s Russia is aggressive and imperialistic, [and so] there’s no reason we should respect that agreement.”.