In a highly symbolic move expressing solidarity with Ukraine, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled together to the embattled Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 15.
The three leaders took hours-long train trip on their
journey from the west Ukrainian city of Lviv to the capital Kyiv, allegedly
“endangering their lives” due to security risks involved in traveling within a
war zone, though there was no risk to their lives as such because they had
requested prior permission for the official visit from the Kremlin, which was
graciously granted keeping in view diplomatic conventions.
Accompanying the trio of premiers was a “special guest” of
the Ukraine government, Jaroslaw Kaczynski—the deputy prime minister of Poland,
the head of Law and Justice (PiS) Party to which the president and prime
minister of Poland belong and the infamous “puppet master” who hires and fires
government executives and ministers on a whim.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski is the twin brother of the late President
Lech Kaczynski, who died in a plane crash at Smolensk, Russia, in 2010 along
with 95 other Poles, among them political and military leaders, as they traveled
to commemorate the Katyn massacre that occurred during the Second World War.
Subsequent Polish and international investigations led by
independent observers conclusively determined that the crash-landing was an
accident caused by fog and pilot error. Still, Kaczynski, 72, has long
suspected [1] that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a role in provoking
the accident, and is harboring a personal grudge against the Russian president.
Speaking alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at
Kyiv, Kaczynski said: “I think that it is necessary to have a peace
mission—NATO, possibly some wider international structure—but a mission that
will be able to defend itself, which will operate on Ukrainian territory.”
Kaczynski’s escalatory rhetoric isn’t merely a verbal
threat, as a secret
plan [2] for a “peacekeeping mission” involving 10,000 NATO troops from the
member states surreptitiously occupying Lviv and the rest of towns in western
Ukraine and imposing a limited no-fly zone is allegedly being prepared by the
Polish government that could potentially trigger an all-out war between Russia
and the transatlantic military alliance.
The plan is seemingly on hiatus due to a disagreement
between figurehead Polish President Andrzej Duda and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, as
Duda wanted Washington’s approval before going ahead, whereas Kaczynski
appeared keen to obtain political mileage from the Ukraine crisis and was also
desperate for settling personal score with Putin, even if his impulsive and
capricious attitude risked triggering a catastrophic Third World War.
In another diplomatic fiasco involving Kaczynski’s shady
hand in the Polish policymaking, Secretary of State Tony Blinken suggested
early this month that Poland could hand over its entire fleet of 28 Soviet-era
MiG-29s to Ukraine, and in return, the United States government would
“backfill” the Polish Air Force with American F-16s.
“We are looking actively now at the question of airplanes
that Poland may provide to Ukraine, and looking at how we might be able to
backfill it should Poland decide to supply those planes,” Blinken told a
briefing in Chisinau on March 6.
The transfer might have been possible if the deal was kept
under wraps, but that became impossible after Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign
affairs and security policy chief, declared unequivocally to reporters on Feb.
27 that the bloc would provide Ukraine with fighter jets.
The Ukraine government heard the proposal and ran with it,
producing infographics claiming they were about to receive 70 used Russian
fighter jets from Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria. A Ukrainian government
official told
Politico [3] that Ukrainian pilots had even traveled to Poland to wrap up
the deal and bring the planes back over the border.
Upon getting wind of the illicit deal, Russian defense
spokesman Igor Konashenkov issued a stark warning that any attempt by an
outside power to facilitate a no-fly zone over Ukraine, including providing
aircraft to Kyiv, would be considered a belligerent in the war and treated
accordingly.
Hours after the Russian warning, the Polish Foreign
Ministry issued an emphatic denial, saying providing aircraft to Ukraine
was out of question as the MiG-29 fleet constituted the backbone of the Polish
Air Force.
The deal was categorically scuttled on March 3 by Polish
President Andrzej Duda: “We are not sending any jets to Ukraine because that
would open military inference in the Ukrainian conflict. We are not joining
that conflict. NATO is not party to that conflict,” Duda
said [4].
In a bizarre turn of events overriding its own president’s
categorical statement, the Polish government announced on March 8 that it was
ready to transfer the aircraft to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany at the
disposal of the United States which could then hand them over to Ukraine.
Clearly, there was a disagreement between Poland’s
figurehead President Duda and de facto leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski over the
aircraft transfer deal, too. Ultimately, Kaczynski prevailed and the Polish
government announced it was ready to transfer the aircraft to Ukraine via an
intermediary.
The denouement of the comedy of errors, however, came a day
later on March 9, after the United States, while occupying a high moral ground,
unequivocally rejected the “preposterous” Polish offer, initially made on
Warsaw’s behalf by none other than the EU’s foreign affairs head and the US
secretary of state.
The prospect of flying combat aircraft from NATO territory
into the war zone “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” the
Pentagon sanctimoniously revealed on March 9. “It is simply not clear to us
that there is a substantive rationale for it,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby
dignifiedly added.
The only conclusion that could be drawn from the reluctant
Polish offer of transferring its entire fleet of MiG-29s to Ramstein at the
disposal of the United States is that it was simply a humbug designed to
provide face-saving to its NATO patron while it was already decided behind the
scenes that Washington would spurn Poland’s nominal offer.
Nonetheless, CNN reported
March 6 [5] Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley visited a week
before an undisclosed airfield near the Ukraine border that has become a hub
for shipping weapons. The airport's location remains a secret to protect the
shipments of weapons, including anti-aircraft and anti-armor missiles, into
Ukraine. Although the report didn’t name the location, the airfield was likely
in Poland along Ukraine’s border.
“US European Command (EUCOM) is at the heart of the massive
shipment operation, using its liaison network with allies and partners to
coordinate ‘in real time’ to send materials into Ukraine, a Defense official
said. EUCOM is also coordinating with other countries, including the United
Kingdom, in terms of the delivery process ‘to ensure that we are using our
resources to maximum efficiency to support the Ukrainians in an organized way,’
the official added.”
Besides deploying 15,000 additional troops in Eastern Europe
last month, total number of US troops in Europe is now expected to reach
100,000. “We have 130 jets at high alert. Over 200 ships from the high north to
the Mediterranean, and thousands of additional troops in the region,” NATO
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
told CNN [6].
A spokesman for US European Command told CNN the United
States was sending two Patriot missile batteries to Poland, and was also
considering deploying THAAD air defense system, a more advanced system
equivalent in capabilities to Russia’s S-400 air defense system.
Famous for hosting CIA’s black sites where alleged al-Qaeda
operatives were water-boarded and tortured before being sent to Guantanamo Bay
in the early years of the war on terror, in Poland alone the US military
footprint now exceeds 10,000 troops as the majority of 15,000 troops sent to
Europe last month went to Poland to join the 4,000 US troops already stationed
there.
The airfields and training camps in the border regions of
Poland have a become a hub for transporting lethal weapons and heavily armed
militants to Lviv in west Ukraine, who then travel to the battlefields in Kyiv
and east Ukraine.
President Biden arrived in Poland Friday and spoke to
American troops bolstering NATO's eastern flank. Biden shared a meal with
soldiers from the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division stationed in southeastern
Polish city Rzeszow, which has been acting as a staging area for NATO’s
military assistance to Ukraine while also serving as a waypoint for refugees
fleeing the violence.
Ahead of the NATO summit attended by President Biden
Thursday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced the transatlantic
military alliance would double the number of battlegroups it had deployed in
Eastern Europe.
“The first step is the deployment of four new NATO
battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, along with our
existing forces in the Baltic countries and Poland,” Stoltenberg said. “This
means that we will have eight multinational NATO battlegroups all along the
eastern flank, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.”
NATO issued
a statement [7] after Thursday's emergency summit attended by Joe Biden and
European leaders: “In response to Russia’s actions, we have activated NATO’s
defense plans, deployed elements of the NATO Response Force, and placed 40,000
troops on our eastern flank, along with significant air and naval assets, under
direct NATO command supported by Allies’ national deployments. We are also
establishing four additional multinational battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary,
Romania, and Slovakia.”
In an interview with
CBC News [8] on March 8, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned
that a Russian attack on the supply lines of allied nations supporting Ukraine
with arms and munitions would be a dangerous escalation of the war raging in
Eastern Europe. “Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is defending itself. If
there is any attack against any NATO country, NATO territory, that will trigger
Article 5.”
Reminiscent of the Three Musketeers’ motto “all for one and
one for all,” Article 5 is the self-defense clause in NATO's founding treaty
which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all 30 member
nations. “I'm absolutely convinced President Putin knows this and we are
removing any room for miscalculation, misunderstanding about our commitment to
defend every inch of NATO territory,” Stoltenberg said.
NATO chief said there's a clear distinction between
supply lines within Ukraine and those operating outside its borders. “There is
a war going on in Ukraine and, of course, supply lines inside Ukraine can be
attacked,” he said. “An attack on NATO territory, on NATO forces, NATO
capabilities, that would be an attack on NATO.”
On March 13, Russian forces launched
a missile attack [9] at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in the western part
of the country. The military facility, less than 25 km from the Polish border,
is one of Ukraine's biggest and the largest in the western part of the country.
Since 2015, US Green Berets and National Guard troops had been training
Ukrainian forces at the Yavoriv center before they were evacuated alongside
diplomatic staff in mid-February.
The training center was hit by a barrage of 30 cruise
missiles launched from Russian strategic bombers, killing at least 35 people,
though Russia's defense ministry claimed up to 180
foreign mercenaries [10] and large caches of weapons were destroyed at the
training center.
International diplomacy is predicated on the principle of
quid-pro-quo. Russia evidently has no intention of mounting an incursion into
NATO territory. But if the duplicitous Polish leadership is hatching treacherous
plots to clandestinely occupy western Ukraine and impose no-fly zone over it,
then Russia obviously reserves the right to give a befitting response to
perfidious henchmen and their international backers, irrespective of the
“sacrosanct and inviolable red lines” etched in the institutional memory of servile
lickspittles of the transatlantic military alliance.
Citations:
[1] Three
EU prime ministers visit Kyiv as Russian attacks intensify:
[2] Secret
Plan to Send 10,000 NATO “Peacekeeping Troops” Into Ukraine:
[3] How
Biden scuttled Polish aircraft deal:
[4] Poland
will not send fighter jets into Ukraine, Andrzej Duda:
[5] Mark
Milley visited an undisclosed airfield near the Ukraine border:
[6] Pentagon
shores up its NATO defenses in Europe:
[7] NATO
doubles battlegroups in 'Eastern Flank' States:
[8] NATO
chief warns Russia away from attacking supply lines:
[9] Pentagon
push to send more trainers to Ukraine was scrapped:
[10] Russian airstrike killed 180 foreign mercenaries at Yavoriv:
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