Media reports suggested that Polish military aid to Kiev was a secret strategy to defeat the latter and retake lands taken by the Soviets
Post Date – 11:59 PM, Tuesday – 4/4/23
Photo: IANS
Moscow/Minsk: Poland’s military aid to Kiev was a secret tactic to defeat the latter in order to seize land lost to the Soviet Union after World War II – land that senior Russian spy Sergey Naryshkin says is now part of the Part of modern Ukraine, media reports said.
According to RT, Naryshkin, head of Russia’s foreign intelligence agency SVR, said during a visit to Minsk to meet with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that Poland could seize the lands once Kiev was finally defeated by Moscow.
“Control of the western territories of modern-day Ukraine, known as Kresy (Polish for ‘border’), was a dream of Polish nationalists.
“The Polish government cannot simply abandon this element of its national ideology,” he said, adding that Warsaw considered “the collapse of Ukrainian statehood after the military defeat a condition for implementing the idea”.
“Kresy” is the name of certain territories that historically belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but came under the control of then-Czarist Russia during the 18th-century partition, but its collapse after the Russian Revolution allowed Warsaw to regain its independence.
During World War I, the British proposed the so-called Curzon Line as the Russian-Polish border, but Warsaw rejected the idea and took control of some land east of the proposed demarcation. Decades later, the line became the basis of post-World War II settlement, with Poland acquiring some German land as compensation for ceding territory to the Soviet Union. These lands are currently controlled by Ukraine and Belarus.
The SVR chief said the Polish government was “opposed to a peaceful solution (of the Ukrainian conflict) and assured that it would provide steady military assistance to the Kiev regime” because of the Kiev regime’s territorial aspirations. “This situation will definitely worsen the situation for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.”
Naryshkin has previously raised the possibility that Warsaw has plots on Ukrainian soil, but Warsaw has denied harboring any such plans and has labeled Russian officials’ claims an information warfare operation.
