Poland

There is a particular sadness in watching two friends turn on each other, and a particular obscenity in watching a third party — the one who wishes them both dead — smile at the sight. That is what has come to pass, in the summer of 2026, between Poland and Ukraine. Not the familiar drama of Russia against the West, but something stranger and more disheartening: two allies, one of them fighting for its very existence, reaching back eighty years to open a grave. Poland’s deputy prime minister and defense minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz — the leader of its peasant party — announced that Ukraine will have serious trouble entering the European Union so long as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and its nationalists remain on its banners. One cannot, he said, raise onto a European pedestal those who destroy European cooperation; with Bandera, Ukraine will not enter the Union. And in almost the same breath — this is the detail that gives the game away — he added that Poland would not be handing over its MiG-29 fighter jets after all. History and weapons, fused in a single sentence. ...

There is a comforting boundary that most Europeans have drawn around this war, and it runs along Ukraine’s borders. On one side, they tell themselves, is the killing field — terrible, but contained, a tragedy happening to someone else, in a country that is not in the alliance and therefore not quite the alliance’s problem. On the other side is Europe proper, safe beneath the umbrella, protected by the most powerful military pact in history and by the four words every schoolchild can recite: an attack on one is an attack on all. It is a soothing geography. It is also a fiction, and the people who govern Russia have been saying so out loud, on television and from official podiums, for some time now. The war was never only about Ukraine. Ukraine is the front line of something larger, and the comfortable assumption that the danger stops at a particular river is the most dangerous assumption Europe currently holds. ...

When the migrants began to mass in the forests of the Belarus-Poland border in the autumn of 2021, the world reached almost automatically for the only category it had ready: a migration crisis, a humanitarian problem, a question of how a wealthy Europe ought to treat the desperate people arriving at its edge. That framing felt natural, and it was a trap. What was happening on that border was not a flow of refugees that a generous policy might have absorbed. It was an attack — a deliberate, engineered assault on a sovereign state — and the migrants freezing in the forest were not its authors but its ammunition. A cornered dictator had discovered something genuinely new: a weapon no air-defence system can intercept, no sanctions list can ground, no radar can see coming, because the weapon is made of human beings. To read that November as a migration problem is to mistake the projectile for the conflict. The projectile, in this case, was alive, deceived, and dying, and that was the entire point. ...