Poland next after Ukraine?
Recent calls by a member of the Russian State Council to invade Poland should be taken with a grain of salt but not ignored completely, according to a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.
“I don’t think it’s a high probability that the Russian military invades Poland, I also don’t think it’s zero,” former Ambassador Steven Pifer, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution‘s Center on the United States and Europe, told the Herald Wednesday.
On Monday, Ramzan Kadyrov, the despotic leader of Russia’s Chechnya republic, said in a Telegram post that the invasion of NATO member Poland should come after Russia completes its so-called special operation in Ukraine.
“What if, after the successful completion of the NMD, Russia begins to denazify and demilitarize the next country? After all, after Ukraine, Poland is on the map! I will not hide that I personally have such an intention,” Kadyrov said in an interview with Chechen press minister Akhmed Dudayev. Kadyrov is also a Colonel-General in the Russian military.
The “denazification” of Ukraine was the ostensible reason for Russia to invade their democratic neighbor last February, when an ongoing conflict there, which began in 2014 with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, exploded into a full-scale war.
Beyond that excuse, Russian President Vladimir Putin has maintained that former Soviet state Ukraine was historically Russian territory.
If that’s good enough reason to invade a country, and the former KGB agent turned president’s ambitions are large enough, NATO could have reason to worry, Pifer said. Large swathes of Poland, and the Baltic countries, could technically fit the “historic Russia” definition as well.
“I do worry a bit that if Putin’s ambitions go beyond Ukraine that NATO members have to be concerned,” he said.
Still, despite the potential for further conflict and notwithstanding Kadyrov’s assertion, Pifer said that it would be better for the Russians if their aggression were to end in Ukraine and not advance into neighboring countries.
“If you are a member of the Russian General Staff the last thing you want to do right now is get into a fight with NATO,” he said.
According to the ambassador, he’s not even sure the Russian military could mount a war with Poland or any other NATO state, considering how their war with the Ukrainian armed forces is going.
“Even though the Russian Air Force is 10 times the size, it’s a year later and — nobody would have predicted this — the Ukrainian Air Force is still flying,” he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in London Wednesday asking for British support in defense of his country’s sovereignty and for a fresh supply of fighter jets.
“We know Russia will lose and we know victory will change the world,” Zelensky told Parliament.
It is unclear if leaders in the U.K. will acquiesce.