In Widening Ukraine Debate, It’s Paris v. Poland

Warsaw in February, in case you haven’t heard, is the new April in Paris: the place to be, even if your name is Joe Biden. Fresh off the heels of his surprise five-hour visit to Kyiv on Monday, the American president will meet Tuesday with his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, and deliver remarks that can be expected to rally continued support for Ukraine as the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion draws near. Poland, which shares a long border with Ukraine and where there are some 11,000 American service members under the aegis of NATO, has emerged as one of Ukraine’s staunchest advocates. France, where there have been no American troops for a long time, has also supported Ukraine, but often in a more measured way. President Macron says he backs President Zelensky’s 10-point peace plan but is also adamant about not wanting to crush Russia. That has more or less always been his position, and he reinforced it in an interview with France’s leading Sunday newspaper, in which he said all Europeans would pay the price of a war with no end. Poland has been jockeying for greater influence in Europe and leveraging the generally limp German line on Ukraine to acquire it. At the moment it is winning the publicity battle; after all, the backdrop for Mr. Biden’s speech today will be the gardens of Warsaw’s Royal Castle, not the Eiffel Tower. The Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, wants to see more American troops in his country. According to the Department of State, America has approximately $20 billion in active government-to-government sales cases with Poland under the Foreign Military Sales system.Warsaw, like Kyiv, has repeatedly and early on sought the delivery of modern fighter jets to Ukraine, but out of logistical concerns and fears of escalation, Washington has so far resisted those entreaties.On Wednesday Mr. Biden will reportedly speak with Mr. Duda and other leaders of the Bucharest Nine, the group of the easternmost members of the NATO military alliance, among which Poland and Romania are particularly strategic right now. Yet contrary to what Mr. Morawiecki told a French television network recently, there is no indication that Vladimir Putin — whom a former French president, François Hollande, calls “radically rational” — seeks to attack Poland. That narrative aligns with Ukraine’s and is mirrored in much of the British press, where bombastic evocations of a third world war tend to obfuscate what increasingly has the contours, as the Israeli analyst Gal Luft has suggested, of a frozen conflict. Most of the fighting in Ukraine right now, and most of where it will be in the months ahead, is in the large eastern Donbas, which along with Crimea is an area that Mr. Putin covets far more than Kyiv. One year after a column of Russian tanks backed away from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv has become a city of reopened embassies and air-raid sirens that, when they still sound, do not necessarily send people scrambling for shelters as they do in, say, Israel. As long as Russian troops remain in Ukraine — and to listen to Mr. Putin’s own state-of-the-nation speech today, it is clear he has no interest in removing them — Kyiv officials will need to work overtime to keep their war-torn country’s plight in the headlines. Yet the contrast between the “let’s discuss this” Parisian tack and Ukraine’s increasing threats to take the battle to Moscow — with the Warsaw weathervane tilting toward the latter — underscores Mr. Biden’s fraught position. Foreign adversaries notwithstanding, even some prominent Republicans, including the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, were quick to pounce on the president. Mr. Biden is “very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He’s not done anything to secure our own border here at home,” Mr. DeSantis told Fox News on Monday. He added that America should distance itself from a “proxy war” and asked, “What is the strategic objective? … Just saying it’s an open-ended blank check [to Ukraine] is unacceptable.”These comments come as the American public’s support for Ukraine is slipping. The White House has essentially admitted that there is no swift conclusion to the year-long war in sight, at least not in the short term. Americans will never be as blasé as the French, nor will America ever be as close to Russia as is Poland. Three days before a somber anniversary in Europe, is President Biden any closer to delivering the clarity needed to bridge these rippling Continental divides, and stop the bleeding in Ukraine?

In Widening Ukraine Debate, It’s Paris v. Poland

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