Chronic. The Poles have the tragedy of history inscribed in their genes and, for them, Russia’s war in Ukraine is a consecration of this. On August 13, 2008, while the Russian army was intervening in Georgia, the then Polish President, Lech Kaczynski, traveled to Tbilisi, the capital, accompanied by his Ukrainian colleague, Viktor Yushchenko, and the three Baltic leaders , to support the Georgian President. In a fiery speech in front of thousands of demonstrators, he issued this warning: “Today it’s Georgia, tomorrow it will be Ukraine, the day after tomorrow the Baltic countries and perhaps, later, it will be my country, Poland! »
Lech Kaczynski died two years later in an air disaster in Smolensk, Russia. On March 15, his twin brother, Jaroslaw, now number two in the government and leader of the nationalist-conservative party in power, Law and Justice (PiS), in his own way, wanted to prove him right, by accompanying three first ministers, the Pole Mateusz Morawiecki, the Czech Petr Fiala and the Slovenian Janez Jansa in kyiv, where, in the middle of the war, they met President Volodymyr Zelensky. It was a daring gesture, coming from central Europe and claimed as such because where, better than in this region, do we know the Russian intentions? Warsaw had just informed the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, and the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the day before. The absence of two leaders, however, was noted: that of the Slovak Prime Minister, Eduard Heger, who later regretted having bowed to the objections of his security services, and, above all, that of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban – who himself has not regretted anything, not having been invited.
Central Europe will not have escaped the numerous geopolitical upheavals inflicted by the war in Ukraine. At the end of January, the Hungarian and Polish prime ministers still appeared together alongside Marine Le Pen in a “sovereignty summit” in Madrid. Two months later, their political proximity shattered on the Russian offensive, against which Mr. Orban, a friend of Vladimir Putin, refused to let Western arms deliveries pass through Hungary, while Poland was becoming, it, a veritable hub of military assistance to Ukraine. Just before the war, Viktor Orban went to the Kremlin to negotiate the security of his gas supply. Today, the Polish President, Andrzej Duda, the open critic on television and the number two diplomat in Warsaw, Marcin Przydacz, calls the Russian policy of Budapest a“erroneous” and “short-sighted”.
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