HS Analysis | The war makes Poland a great power, whose important partners are Ukraine and Finland

Schools the fall semester started in Poland on September 1, and many classrooms were crowded. of the Polish Minister of Education Przemysław Czarnek too about 185,000 Ukrainian students who fled the war to Poland started school

The number is actually not very large compared to expectations and conditions. Czarnek told the English language of the Polish state news agency PAP The First News – publication that there are about 7,000 fewer students than there were at the end of the spring semester.

According to estimates, there are 700,000–800,000 school-aged refugee children from Ukraine in Poland. Some have returned back home, but most attend a Ukrainian school through distance education. After all, we already had time to get used to it during the corona pandemic.

in Poland no one knows the number of living Ukrainian refugees. There are 1.2 million registered people, but many have not made official announcements. Estimates of the total number of Ukrainians vary between two and even four million.

The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians in Poland are women and children while the father of the family is fighting against Russia. The hope of returning home lives on strong.

It seems that the war in Ukraine will not be resolved at least during the next winter. And when the war ends, there will be a long period of reconstruction ahead. Many have no home to return to. Many get a good job, because unemployment in Poland is negligible and many sectors suffer from labor shortages.

Some may also have political opinions that are no longer fashionable at home. Ukraine is denied 11 pro-Russian parties, the largest of which, the For Life forum, had 44 MPs in the 450-member parliament.

38 million the inhabitant’s Poland has been made ethnically uniform during the Second World War and in the post-war border and population transfers. The country may very well end up with a Ukrainian-speaking minority whose population share is in the same category as Finland’s Swedish-speaking population.

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The adaptation of the Ukrainians to Poland has gone amazingly well so far, and the noises of gravel have remained few. At least primary school children adapt to Polish teaching quickly, as the languages ​​are closely related. In addition, many schools offer some instruction in Ukrainian as well.

The Polish government led by the Law and Justice party opened its doors to refugees in February. Poland is one of Ukraine’s most important donors. Most of Poland’s aid is military, and the government’s line has not been questioned by the opposition.

The sounds of gravel may be heard more than before next winter, because Poland suffers from the economic effects of the war in Ukraine more than many other European countries. Solidarity towards the Ukrainians may be put to the test.

“Next winter will decide quite a lot,” says the docent of history at the University of Oulu, a researcher of Eastern Europe Jussi Jalonen. He has previously worked as a visiting researcher at the University of Warsaw.

“However, inflation is running high in Poland, and some kind of protests can be expected in the winter,” predicts Jalonen. “If there were, they would be against both the government and Russia.”

Polish and Ukraine’s rapid rapprochement is a fact, but a long common history does not necessarily make it easy. From the past there are also pain points that Russia has tried to exploit with the help of propaganda to drive a wedge between the allies.

The worst pain point is the Volyn massacre in Eastern Galicia of Ukraine in the summer of 1943 and after. The Ukrainian rebel army UPA and its allies killed an estimated one hundred thousand Poles in the villages and towns of the region.

The leader of UPA’s political wing OUN-B is considered to be the reason Stepan Bandera, who feared that the defeat of Nazi Germany would lead to the re-annexation of western Ukraine to Poland. Although Bandera himself was in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp at the time of the bloodshed, where the Gestapo had thrown his pro-independence ally.

The restoration of the honor of Western Ukrainian nationalists began in Ukraine already after the 2004 Orange Revolution. A pro-Western president Viktor Yushchenko appointed Bandera as the National Hero of Ukraine for his last work in 2010. His successor, pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych revoked the title, but the president who came to power in the war year of 2014 in eastern Ukraine Petro Poroshenko reversed the cancellations of his predecessor.

An outraged Polish parliament passed a law in January 2018 criminalizing “denial of crimes by Ukrainian nationalists”. The Ukrainian parliament, on the other hand, condemned the law enacted by the Polish parliament as “contrary to democratic principles and the partnership of countries”.

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“If Russia loses the war, someone will fill that void.”

The year 2019 the president of Ukraine who came to power in the elections Volodymyr Zelenskyi at the beginning of his term allowed the continuation of investigations of mass graves in Volhynia together with the Poles. Ukraine had frozen the investigations a couple of years earlier.

“This was absolutely central to resolving the dispute,” says Jussi Jalonen. “But the warming of relations is actually a 25-year development. The cooler season under Poroshenko was short.”

Jalonen schedules Suomen Kuvalehten in his article published in July, the beginning of the partnership between Poland and Ukraine to 1952. At that time, the Polish emigrant magazine Kultura published in Paris published an article according to which the Poles should accept the city of Lviv, or the former Polish Lwow, as belonging to Ukraine.

Polish editor-in-chief of the magazine Jerzy Giedroyc, his Polish counterpart Juliusz Mieroszewski and Ukrainian exile Yuri Lavrinenko began to develop the idea that Poland and Ukraine, freed from communism, must be equal partners, otherwise they will be at the feet of Russia before long.

“The Giedroyc-Mieroszewski doctrine has been the cornerstone of Polish foreign policy in the post-Cold War period in the same way as Cobble stone–Kekkonen line to Finland during the Cold War,” Jalonen writes.

Russian the February invasion of Ukraine has sealed this doctrine.

“We want the truth, not revenge,” the Polish president Andrzej Duda said in his speech July 11, when Poland celebrates the commemoration of the so-called Bloody Sunday in Volhynia. The truth also includes the fact that Poles’ hands were not bloodless before and after the massacres.

If Ukraine succeeds in making the president of Russia Vladimir Putin plans empty on the battlefields, its ally Poland is another big winner. It is also worth noting that the “Giedroyc-Mieroszewski doctrine” of the union of neighboring countries as a counterweight to Russia applied not only to Ukraine but also to Belarus.

Would Poland become a European power alongside Germany and France?

Warsaw has been the bad boy of the European Union since 2015. Destroyer of democracy, independent judiciary, freedom of speech and women’s rights, friend of the extreme right in Europe.

This line has strangely softened during the Russian war of aggression. Perhaps not least because EU Commission blackmails and lures Poland to the right path by pledging the payment of billions of stimulus.

Poland’s next general election is coming up in a year, and not for the conservative leader of the Law and Justice party to Jarosław Kaczyński the rooster of honor crows if the state coffers are empty. The party’s very high support in itself is steadily declining.

It seems very possible that Poland will return to Brussels’ lines, at least on the surface. The importance of a strengthening Poland in the Union is certainly greater than ever, especially since no one has filled the place left by Britain in the community.

In NATO Poland is already a staunch ally of the United States, and the war in Ukraine makes Poland even more important. Rzeszów Airport in south-eastern Poland is a true logistics center for Western military aid.

Poland’s military spending is about to rise to three percent of gross domestic product, i.e. well above the NATO target. Last week, the government ordered 48 new field guns from a domestic supplier, to replace those given to Ukraine.

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“The importance of a strengthening Poland in the Union is certainly greater than ever, especially since no one has filled the place left by Britain in the community.”

At the same time, Poland is assembling a significant army in terms of fighter strength. Conscription was abolished in 2009, and since then Polish defense has been based on a mercenary army and voluntary territorial defense forces.

This year, voluntary military service has been introduced alongside these, for which recruits receive a year’s training and a monthly salary of just under a thousand euros in zlotys, says the news website Notes from Poland. When the regional defense forces are strengthened at the same time, the total strength of the armed forces will more than double: from 143,500 to 300,000 fighters.

“If If Russia loses the war, someone will fill that void,” says Jalonen. According to him, Poland’s military equipment began already in 2014, when Poland began to develop its defense capability against a surprise attack, as a result of the occupation of Crimea.

“During the past two years, it has no longer been so much a matter of fending off a sudden attack, but, at least on paper, a clear increase in military power,” Jalonen continues. “Poland is being developed first and foremost as a pillar of NATO in Eastern Europe.”

According to Jalonen, the strengthening of Poland must be taken into account here as well.

“Finland should understand that with Finland’s NATO membership, Poland will become Finland’s strongest ally. Finland, Sweden and Poland form a military trilateral connection to NATO’s eastern border.”