KAROL NAWROCKI: Not for the first time in history, we are Europe’s shield.
Today, Poland is a key country on NATO’s eastern flank, a defender of the EU’s eastern borders and a haven for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have fled Russian aggression.
The sound of roaring engines filled the air as the French Leclerc and American Abrams tanks painted in Polish colors rolled on the right bank of the Vistula. Near the village of Korzeniewo, the river is more than three hundred metres wide, but the self-propelled pontoon bridges did their job perfectly. There was no time to rest after the crossing – the soldiers still had several hundred kilometers to go.
This stunning location provided the backdrop for the Dragon-24 exercise in March, where accredited journalists and invited politicians witnessed NATO’s largest military manoeuvres since the Cold War. For two and a half weeks, 20,000 soldiers from Poland, the US, the UK, France, Germany and other countries trained in cooperation on land, sea, air and in cyberspace. “The Dragon-24 exercises demonstrate our readiness to defend the North Atlantic Alliance’s territory,” said Polish President Andrzej Duda, who observed the manoeuvres.
US General Philip M. Breedlove, former supreme commander of the Alliance’s forces in Europe, has no doubt that ‘in the face of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO’s eastern front must remain united.’ Poland’s location and potential make it vital in this regard. And not for the first time.
The bulwark of the West
In his celebrated book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996, the American political scientist Samuel Huntington identified nine modern civilizations. In Europe, two are clearly dominant: Western civilization, founded on Catholic and later Protestant Christianity, and Orthodox civilization, with Russia as its current centre.
A glance at the map shows that among western countries, Poland is the most easterly. It has been something of a guardian of the Western world for centuries – and has often paid a high price for it.
In the 13th century, Poland’s fragmented territories faced three Mongol invasions, which brought plunder and demographic loss, hindering the country’s unification. The 15th to 18th centuries saw a series of wars between Poland and the Ottoman Empire along with their Tartar allies. During that period, our country was sometimes called the bulwark of Christianity because in defending its own borders, it also protected the security of the entire Christian Europe. This was clearly demonstrated in the 1683 Battle of Vienna. The armies of Poland and the Holy Roman Empire, under the joint command of King Jan III Sobieski, crushed the mighty Turkish army besieging Vienna. “We came, we saw, and God conquered,” Sobieski reported to Pope Innocent XI. The Ottoman Empire did not rise again after this defeat and was henceforth on the defensive.
Meanwhile, Russia was growing in prominence, especially during the reign of Peter I (1682-1725). For a long time, Poland was able to withstand the new threat from the east. The victories at Orsha (1514), Klushino (1610), and during Stefan Batory’s extended struggle with Ivan the Terrible (1577-1582) serve as evidence of this. The 18th century, however, brought a massive crisis for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tsarist Russia first managed to subjugate Poland and then, together with Prussia and Austria, partitioned it and wiped it off the map of Europe.
Gone was a state that appeared highly democratic compared to neighboring absolute monarchies, with a king chosen by the nobility in free elections, sejmijki (local parliament sessions) and a long tradition of tolerance that allowed Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, as well as Jews, Germans, Armenians, Tatars and representatives of other nations, to live together in peace. One of its kind, the constitution of 1791 was highly focused on various aspects of freedom. It mentioned ‘personal freedom’, ‘civic freedom’, freedom for ‘all rites and religions’ and many others.
Russian imperialism
The final partition of Poland in 1795 started what its inhabitants viewed as a long period of enslavement. For the Poles who fell under the tsars’ rule, this enslavement took the form of bloodily suppressed uprisings, Russification and deportation to Siberia.
The death in 1796 of Catherine II – co-architect of all three partitions of Poland – did not stop Russian territorial expansion. On the contrary, in the 19th century, the tsarist state subjugated, among others, Finland, Bessarabia (which overlapped with much of present-day Moldova) and the Transcaucasian lands. But Russian appetites went much further. The so-called Sazonov Plan, proclaimed after the outbreak of the First World War, envisaged the annexation of East Prussia and Eastern Galicia. Russia’s later aspirations stretched even to Constantinople.
The Bolsheviks, who seized power in Russia in 1917 as a result of the bloody October Revolution, officially proclaimed the noble creed of self-determination for nations. In reality, though, they have replaced tsarist imperialism with an even more horrific one, bringing terror, destruction and enslavement on an unprecedented scale.
Vladimir Lenin and his comrades dreamt of extending the Red Revolution to Germany and as far south-east as Italy. But Poland, which had been rebuilding its statehood after a long captivity that ended after the First World War, stood in their way. “Over the corpse of white Poland lies the road to global conflagration. […] To the West!” wrote Mikhail Tukhachevsky, commander of the Bolshevik Western Front, in an order to his soldiers in July 1920.
For a safe Europe
The Polish army’s victory over the Bolsheviks at the Battle of Warsaw in 1920 – dubbed the eighteenth decisive battle in world history by Lord Edgar Vincent D’Abernon – saved not only a reborn Poland but also Central Europe.
Sadly, not all nations gained independence at that time. Ukrainian authorities fleeing from the Bolsheviks found refuge in our country. For over a year now, a commemorative plaque on the wall in front of the Bristol Hotel in Tarnow reminds us that: “In 1920–1922, this building was the seat of Poland’s allies: the Council of the Republic, the Government and the Supreme Ataman of the Armed Forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, Symon Petliura.” The ataman’s brother, Oleksandr, later served in the Polish Army as a contract officer. Many Ukrainian and Georgian servicemen received similar contracts.
The Promethean movement, which supported the independence aspirations of the peoples conquered by Soviet Russia between 1918 and 1921, was strong in the interwar Polish Republic. ‘As long as many nations are enslaved by Russia, we cannot look calmly into the future,’ said Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, one of the fathers of Polish independence after the First World War.
But the malicious pact formed by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin in August 1939 unleashed upon Europe a disaster that surpassed even the horrors of 1914–1918. The Soviet Union wasted no time in implementing the provisions of the pact. First, in September 1939, together with the German Reich, it invaded Poland and seized half of its territory. The following year, the Soviets took the Karelian Isthmus from Finland, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania, and all of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. By the end of the Second World War, the Red Army had advanced all the way to the Elbe. Much of Central and Eastern Europe fell under the Soviet sphere of influence for several decades.
The collapse of the communist system allowed nations subjugated by the USSR to break free again. But Russian imperialism is now re-emerging in a post-Soviet form. In these circumstances, the Polish Army, strengthened by equipment purchases in recent years, is the foundation of NATO’s eastern flank. It also supports the Border Guard in protecting the European Union’s eastern border against hybrid attacks from Russia and Belarus. A few years ago, the British Observer noted that ‘Poland stands up for the West against Russia – again.’ This is even more true today.
Karol Nawrocki
Source: DlaPolonii.pl
