Will Poland Refurbish Israeli Patriots for Ukraine War?

In June, rumors swirled in the media that the Biden administration was holding discussions with Israel and Ukraine about the possibility of transferring aging Patriot air defense systems currently in Israel to Ukraine. The CNN reported: “The systems would likely need to be transferred to the US first, where they would undergo refurbishment, before being sent to Ukraine.”

In April, the Israel Defense Forces said it would soon “retire its Patriot systems,” as noted by The Financial Times, though the report elided over providing a valid reason for scraping the much-touted air defense system. Since then, a gag order appears to have been issued on reporting about military co-operation between Israel and Ukraine, as it is a sensitive and strictly off-limits topic.

Russian news agency Sputnik reported on August 12 that Poland had signed an agreement on the production of 48 launchers of the Patriot surface-to-air missile system, United States Ambassador to Poland Mark Brzezinski claimed on Monday during the signing ceremony.

Under a deal worth $1.23 billion (4.7 billion zloty), the M903 launch stations will be produced at Stalowa Wola steelworks in Poland in co-operation with US defense giant Raytheon Technologies Corp. for which the US approved a $2 billion defense loan to Poland last month. The air defense systems production will run through 2027-2029.

The US has been increasingly looking to outsource production of the systems, with a joint US-Japan project hitting a stumbling block in July, the report noted, though it failed to clarify how Poland’s primitive defense production industry would produce launchers for advanced Patriot missile systems when it could hardly produce 155 mm. artillery shells that Ukraine, under the patronage of the US, had to import from a number of European and Asian countries during the two-year-long war.

Clearly, a behind-the-scenes understanding has been reached that instead of refurbishing “aging Israeli Patriot systems” in the US, the launchers would instead be transferred to Poland where they would be refurbished under the supervision of Raytheon’s technicians and then deployed in the Ukraine War.

During the two-year conflict, Israel’s thriving military-industrial complex has provided plenty of weapons, specifically its cutting-edge drone and missile technology, to Ukraine, but mainstream media, on the instructions of the US security establishment, has been especially careful not to report on the “sensitive topic.”  

Instead, Western media bent over backwards to publish misleading reports at the beginning of the Ukraine War that Ukraine’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded for Iron Dome missile interceptors, a risible request that Israel allegedly “contemptuously rebuffed,” after which the Zelensky regime had a fictitious spat with Israeli policymakers.

The clear objective of creating this smokescreen around clandestine military co-operation between Washington’s servile surrogates, Ukraine and Israel, was in deference to Israel’s regional security interests. Because Israel frequently mounts airstrikes on Iran-backed militant groups in Lebanon and Syria, whereas Russia has deployed troops, aircraft and S-400 air defense system at Syria’s Mediterranean coast. If Russia gets even an inkling of Israel’s military assistance to Ukraine, then Israel would have to rethink its belligerent attitude.

Nonetheless, besides pledging to refurbish Israeli Patriot missile launchers for Ukraine, Poland also inked a bilateral security agreement with Ukraine on July 8. Among other substantial commitments, the security agreement signed in Warsaw provided for the development of a mechanism for Poland to shoot down Russian missiles and drones fired in the direction of Poland in Ukrainian airspace, which would legally amount to an unequivocal declaration of war between a NATO member state, Poland, and Russia.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky during a joint press conference with Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk stated: “We are especially grateful for the special arrangements, and this is reflected in the security agreement. It provides for the development of a mechanism to shoot down [by Poland] Russian missiles and drones fired in the airspace of Ukraine in the direction of Poland. I am confident that our teams and the teams of the ministries of defense, together with our military, will work together to work out how we can quickly implement this point of our agreements.”

The vendetta between Russia and Poland, clearly punching above its weight, goes a long way back. 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, 2022, weeks after Russia’s intervention in February.

The “Three Musketeers” 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 Zelensky regime, Jaroslaw Kaczynski—then the deputy prime minister of Poland, the head of Law and Justice (PiS) Party to which the president and prime minister of Poland belonged and the infamous “puppet master” who hired and fired government executives and ministers on a whim.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski is the twin brother of 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 had long suspected that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a role in provoking the accident, and was harboring a personal grudge against the Russian president.

The Polish electorate dispensed poetic justice to kingmaker Kaczynski as he was ousted from power following the October 2023 parliamentary elections in Poland due to his myopic and vindictive policies and Donald Tusk was elected prime minister of the coalition government.

Tusk is a seasoned politician and diplomat who was the President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019. It was expected of him to display statesmanship and revisit the confrontational approach of his predecessors. But clearly, he is going down the same path of perdition that proved fatal not only for egocentric and spiteful politicians but for the Poles as a nation.

Was Nord Stream Sabotaged with Germany’s Approval?

On August 14, German public broadcaster ARD, the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the weekly Die Zeit claimed in a joint report that federal prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant in June against a Ukrainian diving instructor believed to have resided until recently in Poland. The reports identified the alleged saboteur as Volodymyr Z.

The Polish prosecutor’s office confirmed it had received a German arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man. It said it received the warrant in June, but the suspect left for Ukraine a month before. The prosecutor’s office offered a lame excuse that the authorities failed to prevent him from leaving because the relevant information had not percolated down to the country’s border guard.

Clearly, there was a collusion between German and American establishment media, because the very next day, on August 15, The Wall Street Journal published a bizarre scoop, claiming the Nord Stream gas pipelines, providing Russian natural gas to European countries before the war, were blown up by a six-member Ukrainian sabotage team of skilled deep-sea divers in an operation that was initially approved by Vladimir Zelensky and then called off, but which went ahead anyway.

German reports, published only a day before the WSJ scoop, were evidently meant to create a media hype and lend credence to an otherwise asinine report, clearly meant to tarnish the reputation of Ukraine’s former top military commander, who was sacked in February for defying Washington’s diktats of committing more cannon fodder for Ukraine’s much-touted albeit easily foiled counteroffensive last year, while simultaneously attempting to exonerate Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

The WSJ report claims the subversive operation was allegedly directed by a serving army general, who reported to Ukraine’s then commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny. Zelensky initially approved the plan, but later backtracked after the CIA found out about it and asked Kyiv to call it off. Nonetheless, Zaluzhny pressed ahead with the mission, claiming once dispatched, a sabotage team goes incommunicado and cannot be withdrawn.

Nord Stream pipelines were ruptured by blasts under the Baltic Sea in September 2022. Early the following year, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh conclusively proved with irrefutable facts and incontrovertible evidence that explosives were planted on the Nord Stream pipelines by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise, and detonated on orders from Washington in order to wean Germany off Russian energy amidst the Ukraine War.

Seymour Hersh, however, elided over the obvious fact that the sabotage operation was tacitly approved by the German government. For a heavily industrialized nation like Germany, energy security is the lifeline of economy dependent on industrial production. Hence, how is it possible that a six-member team of amateur divers, as claimed by WSJ, or professional US Navy divers, as stated by Hersh, blew up one of the world’s largest natural gas pipeline network without the knowledge of German maritime security forces?

Following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in February 2022, German political establishment, under tremendous pressure from Washington, was itself looking for a pretext to stop importing natural gas from Russia. But violating the international contract was a controversial issue because East Germany, which until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was in the Soviet sphere of influence, has a significant political constituency that shares historical and cultural ties with Russia, and favored cordial relations and energy reliance on Russia despite the war.

The US security establishment, however, persuaded the Scholz government behind the scenes that its notorious saboteurs would do the dirty work and Germany would simply have to acquiesce or maybe point fingers at banana republics like Poland and Ukraine for orchestrating the Nord Stream sabotage.

Despite being an industrial powerhouse of Europe, Germany might have been a sovereign state at liberty to pursue independent foreign policy during the reign of the Third Reich, but since the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War, it has become a virtual colony of the imperial United States, where 50,000 US troops are currently deployed in sprawling Ramstein Air Base and several other military bases.

After the United States, Germany is one of the largest contributors of military assistance to Ukraine, and has provided billions of dollars economic aid during the course of two years. During Ukraine’s Kursk incursion inside Russia, besides British Challenger battle tanks, German Marder infantry vehicles, donated by Berlin to Kyiv, took the lead in mounting the assault.

Ukrainian conscripts and pilots are being trained by German and American military personnel at military bases in Germany. It’s ironic that Germany still claims to be the torchbearer of pacifism and idealism while simultaneously pandering to Washington’s diktats and adding fuel to the fire in the Ukraine War.

Immediately following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced plans in April 2022 to spend an additional €2 billion ($2.16 billion) on military needs, most of which was aimed at providing weapons to Ukraine. Scholz also pledged €100 billion ($112.7 billion) of the 2022 budget for the German armed forces and committed to reaching the target of 2% of GDP spending on defense that was requested by NATO.

In addition, German government announced financial support allowing Kyiv to directly buy tanks from German defense companies like Rheinmetall. Germany specifically provided substantial number of Marder light tanks, armored vehicles equipped with anti-tank missiles, to Ukraine that are now being deployed by Ukraine’s forces in the Kursk battlefield inside Russia. Berlin similarly provided heavy-combat Leopard tanks to Ukraine, though in smaller number.

Despite desperate German attempts to assuage American patrons, a diplomatic furor erupted in May 2021 after it was revealed the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) used a partnership with Denmark's foreign intelligence unit to spy on senior European officials, including then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel. European diplomats complained that it was “grotesque and unacceptable” that friendly intelligence services were keeping tabs on allies, even though Washington’s policy toward servile client states has always been “trust but verify.”

The Wall Street Journal, the official mouthpiece of establishment Republicans, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, that has taken the lead in publishing insider scoops during the four-year tenure of the Biden admin while the Democratic shills, the New York Times and Washington Post, took a backseat out of deference for self-styled “progressives” in the White House, has a history of publishing fabricated reports.

In the aftermath of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal published a misleading report in April 2022 that German chancellor Olaf Scholz had offered Volodymyr Zelensky a chance for peace days before the launch of the Russian military offensive, but the Ukrainian president turned it down.

Then newly elected German chancellor told Zelensky in Munich on February 19, days before the Russian invasion, “that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia,” the Journal revealed. The newspaper also claimed that “the pact would be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security.”

However, Zelensky rejected the offer to make the concession and avoid confrontation, saying that “Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO.”

While making the preposterous allegation that the intransigent Ukrainian leadership vetoed NATO’s “flexible and conciliatory approach” to peacefully settle the dispute in order to exonerate the transatlantic military alliance for its confrontational approach toward Russia since the inception in 1949, the Journal report conveniently overlooked the crucial fact that in November 2021, the US and Ukraine had already signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership.

The agreement unequivocally confirmed “Ukraine’s aspirations for joining NATO” and “rejected the Crimean decision to re-unify with Russia” following the 2014 Maidan coup. Then in December 2021, Russia, in the last-ditch effort to peacefully resolve the dispute, proposed a peace treaty with the US and NATO.

The central Russian proposal was a written agreement assuring that Ukraine would not join the NATO military alliance and, in return, Russia would drawdown its troop buildup along Ukraine’s borders. After the proposed treaty was contemptuously rebuffed by Washington, it appeared the die was cast for Russia’s inevitable invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.