Russia can be defeated and the West has a choice whether to do so in Ukraine or on the Polish border, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in an interview given to a group of journalists, published by the Onet news website. If Russian President Vladimir Putin were to conquer Ukraine, he would do, according to Sikorsky, “what (Adolf) Hitler did to Czechoslovakia”, that is, he would seize the industry of the occupied country, mobilize Ukrainians into the Russian army and send them to fight further west.
“Half of the German tanks that attacked Poland in 1939 were actually Czech. So – if Putin gets Ukraine, he will be stronger. And then we will have a bigger problem,” warned Sikorski. “It is better to stop Putin in Ukraine, 500 or 700 kilometers east of here,” he answered when asked if it would make sense to send ground troops to Ukraine.
Russian reserves are not unlimited and Russia itself is not invincible, says the head of Polish diplomacy. Sikorski recalled that wars can also end in the economic collapse of one side, as happened to Germany in the First World War. And Russia has already spent half of its reserve fund and lost the most profitable outlet for its oil and gas, which it has to sell to India and China at a deep discount. “Our sanctions are working, but sanctions never work immediately,” said the minister, who expects “in a year or two” to see real trouble in the Russian economy. And he also drew attention to the fact that the Ukrainians managed to liberate almost half of the previously occupied territory and are apparently winning the war over the Black Sea, thanks to which they can export grain to the world.
Sikorski hopes that even the presumptive Republican nominee for the White House, Donald Trump, has realized that opposition to providing aid to Ukraine is unpopular in the United States and hurts his re-election prospects. The minister reminded that Trump did not object to the vote on the aid package in the House of Representatives. And it was the Trump administration that sent anti-tank weapons to the Ukrainians even before the war, when other countries did not. “It’s not (Trump’s stance) as black and white as some make it out to be,” he added. “Thank you for the opportunity to criticize our most important allies, but I won’t,” he said when asked about Trump’s conflicting stances on NATO.
Poland is increasing defense spending, now spending four percent of gross domestic product, on par with the US, and could be even more next year. “For us, it’s an existential question,” Sikorski explained. He recalled that in history Russia has attacked Poland many times, but he believes that this time Russia would lose because “as the West, we are much stronger”.
At the Munich Security Conference, German politicians seemed satisfied to Sikorsky that it would take four or five years for Russia to be ready to attack, and that Germany would be ready as well. “But the point is that before Russia arrives in Germany, it will have a few more countries on its way,” he pointed out. Before the attack on Ukraine, Putin described this country as an artificial entity, similar to how former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev now speaks of Latvia. “We can no longer dismiss these threats as just crazy talk because these people have proven that they are capable of making crazy ideas happen,” he said.
However, according to the minister, the danger is not acute, the Russians are not ready to defeat Ukraine now, and therefore are not ready to attack the West. They also had to withdraw part of the troops from the Kaliningrad region, showing that they themselves were not expecting a NATO attack.
Tags: Sikorski give defeating Putin conquered Ukraine threatened fate Czechoslovakia
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