Russia says Ukraine is under threat by ... Poland (?!?)

It’s not immediately obvious how it makes any sense from Vladimir Putin’s point of view, or from Russia’s current situation in Ukraine, for a senior Russian official to be saying this (Shannon Vavra reporting):

Ramzan Kadyrov, a key ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has begun rattling off threats about attacking Poland after Ukraine.

Kadyrov, the head of [the Russian republic of] Chechnya, suggested Monday that Russia should “denazify and demilitarize” Poland next.

“What if, after the successful completion of the NMD [National Missile Defense], Russia begins to denazify and demilitarize the next country? After all, after Ukraine, Poland is on the map! I will not hide that I personally have such an intention,” Kadyrov said on Telegram. “I personally have such an intention, and I have repeatedly stated that the fight against Satanism should continue throughout Europe and, first of all, on the territory of Poland.”

Is Putin’s Message Control falling apart?

Or is this a weird morphing of a claim that Russia was making earlier?

“The Russian leadership has repeatedly made the outlandish claim that Poland is preparing to annex territories in western Ukraine,” wrote Stanislav Kuvaldin of the Carnegie Endowment last summer:

Over the past months, Russian President Vladimir Putin several times stated that the idea of absorbing Ukraine is still alive and well in Poland, while Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev warned that Warsaw “is already making moves to seize western Ukrainian territories.” …

[A]fter Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russian discourse about Poland’s alleged desire to annex parts of Ukraine evolved from conjectures by controversial politicians to direct statements by the most senior officials. The catalyst for this shift appears to have been the March 2022 assertion by Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the Polish ruling party Law and Justice, that a peacekeeping mission by NATO or the UN might be able to stop the hostilities.  

Several days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov theorized that Poland would use this idea as a pretext for seizing control over western Ukraine. Soon thereafter, the SVR began regularly reporting on Poland’s alleged plans to annex Ukrainian territories.

Kuvaldin goes on to explain that this is unlikely to represent any real assumption by Russian officials that Poland intends to absorb part of Ukraine, but is rather a larger historical-propaganda claim to validate Putin’s ideological position under which “Ukraine beyond the borders of 1939 is proclaimed to be the ‘historical’ territory of its neighboring countries [Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Russia], even though much of this land only became part of those countries twenty years earlier, after World War I.“ (Ukraine was a republic within the Soviet Union but not then a part of the Russian Republic.)

In the superficial war polemics in which Russia’s claims are held to be completely cynical, policymakers do always need to keep in mind that national leaders can talk themselves into believing seriously wrong assumptions. As I.F. Stone put it in his most famous quote, "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."

But too often, they do. Kuvaldin observes, “Incredibly, the Russian leadership seems to see this [claim that Poland intends to attack them] as an argument that should convince the Ukrainian people to unite with Russia.”

But this threat of Russia attacking Poland is not new in 2023, either. As Vavra also reports, “‘After Ukraine, if we're given the command, in six seconds we'll show you what we're capable of’,” Kadyrov said of potentially attacking Poland in May of last year [2022].”

Poland, Ramzan Kadyrov has set his eyes on you

(with subtitles, including all 'dons' for purposes of accuracy) pic.twitter.com/nSOq9BNQjn

— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) May 25, 2022

On the other hand, the official Russian news agency TASS in December reported Putin himself repeating the claim about Polish designs on Ukrainian territory:

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said Polish nationalists can’t wait to seize western Ukraine.

"As for the governments of some of our neighbors, Poland, nationalist elements there dream of taking back their so-called historical territories, seizing the western territories that Ukraine gained as a result of a decision by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin following World War II," the president said at a meeting with the Human Rights Council.

He said "these territories were taken away from Poland and given to Soviet Ukraine."

Of course, Poland has an interest in playing up the urgency of a Russia threat to itself. Vavra:

In a recognition that Poland will be dealing with Russian aggression for some time, Poland has also taken steps to build up its military long-term. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawieck announced just weeks ago that Poland will increase defense spending to 4 percent of gross domestic product. And due to the public’s anxiety about the conflict, Poland has been training civilians as soldiers.

In light of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this makes plain, realist geopolitical sense for Poland. And after Russia’s invasion last year, NATO faces a very practical need for a military buildup to prepare for conventional war with Russia. (That observation does not diminish the nefarious motives of some actors on both sides who welcome that situation.)

But US Administrations from Clinton to Cheney-Bush to Obama foolishly looked at NATO expansion as a kind of “freebie,” increasing US influence in Europe with minimal risk of actual military conflict with Russia, which was viewed as a defeated foe too weak to mount a serious military attack in the West. (I omit Trump from the list only because he was obviously so clueless about any such geopolitical considerations.)

But now the NATO countries’ mutual-defense commitments to defend member countries directly bordering on Russia - Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and presumably soon to include Finland and Sweden (both of which are already part of the overlapping EU mutual-defense obligations) - NATO has to provide conventional military defenses strong enough to block a Russian invasion long enough so that NATO won’t have to resort on Day 1 to nuclear weapons. Adding countries to NATO directly bordering on Russia was never the freebie that Cold War triumphalists assumed it to be.

It’s also a problem to assume that the Russians are 10-foot-tall supervillains. Their leaders are just as subject to great-power arrogance and to making dumb public statements as America’s or China’s leaders are. They pretty clearly assumed in 2022 that seizing Kyiv and annexing eastern Ukraine were going to be way more of a proverbial cakewalk than it turned out to be.