Poland

It is sometimes surprising to see how the propaganda discourse and clichés created in past centuries are being resurrected in the context of contemporary information warfare and the aggression against Ukraine – writes Prof. Henryk GŁĘBOCKI.

With Russian President Vladimir Putin continuing to rage war in Ukraine for over a year now, President Joe Biden’s surprise visit to Kyiv and his two days in Warsaw last week signaled that the U.S. will continue to lead the efforts of the free world toward supporting Ukraine for it to win “in the great battle for freedom.”

The Arctic is home to about 4 million people and comprises territories of eight sovereign States. Its population has the same right to sustainable development as the rest of the world, including the right to social and economic development through the sustainable use of their natural resources.

The Polish economy has been well served by a robust policy framework and favourable business conditions, allowing it to converge in living standards to more affluent economies and to navigate the massive shocks that have been experienced in recent years.

When I was growing up in Soviet Ukraine, Poland appeared enigmatic to me—it was both attractive and dangerous, a place from which Ukrainian visitors brought magazines that seemed glamorous by our standards, music LPs, and chewing gum.

We must do everything to ensure that this greatest geopolitical nightmare of the 21st century is finally over.

This should come as no surprise, given that the world did not know about Polish history. It did not know that the Poles value most of all freedom and a sense of community and that, in the face of unprecedented criminal aggression against the country with which we share some past grievances, solidarity in defence of those values comes first.

So fascinating to Angela Merkel, Catherine II liquidated Sich by violence – the last refuge of self-government for free Cossacks under her rule, the last vestige of Ukraine’s political tradition.

Today war, and an exceptionally cruel one at that, is close at hand, and so many people in the West are surprised that Ukrainians do not want to surrender, that they do not want to be Russian. Why is the determination of the Ukrainians not understood in the West?

The abandonment by the Allies and the subsequent erasure of a nation and its culture by an occupying power – this is the greatest collective trauma of the Poles, going even deeper than the history of the Second World War. And also the very core of Polish sensitivity to the world.

Poland has become a pillar of security on the Alliance’s eastern flank thanks to the country’s tremendous economic development, which has helped fund the rapid modernisation and expansion of the national armed forces.

As every year, an international conference on the security of the Western world will be held in Munich in February.

Rising up results from a change in circumstance. In other words, rising is a reaction to a fall. But it is not the only one. Having fallen down or having been knocked over and pulverised, you can either rise again or simply get used to your supine position.

The January Uprising offered a fair chance to break the solidarity of the three partitioners and gain the support of the Western powers, France and Great Britain.

The German crimes of the Second World War cannot be reduced to Nazism or the Holocaust. Without a convergence of political views on this issue, genuine Polish-German reconciliation will be difficult.

Poles have always refused to their fate being decided by others. The nineteenth-century January Uprising – a heroic guerrilla war against the Russian occupier – fits in this attitude.

2023 marks the 160th anniversary of the January Uprising. Despite the passage of years, the echoes of this uprising are still present in public debate. An important, albeit challenging, question ‘to fight (for one’s country’s freedom) or not to fight?’ is still being asked in Central Europe.

One hundred sixty years ago, in September 1863, during the January Uprising, the Russians demolished the Zamoyski Palace in Warsaw, throwing the piano once played by Fryderyk Chopin out of the building’s window. The moment made history.

For more than 250 years, Central Europe has been struggling with the same problem. 160 years ago, an uprising sparked off in which Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Belarusians stood together against the despotism of the Russian tsar and Russian imperialism. Today those nations are uniting to support Ukraine.

The common view that Ultra shaved two years off the war is hard to sustain, but it did save the allies months in time and hundreds of thousands of lives. Britons and Poles can take pride in that achievement. Neither needs to exaggerate it