The Ukrainian War V: Tanks For The Memories

[Hispida]

I always find it amusing when you insist that Russian news is totally unbiased, and take offense to other people picking at your sources, but immediately pick at their sources as well.

Because that's all he has.

i mean, when it comes to radio free europe...

[The Rio Grande River Basin]

Because that's all he has.

i mean, when it comes to radio free europe...

Oh, no I’m not denying their bias. I’m just saying that the guy who fervently supports Sputnik and RT is one to be talking.

[Northern Seleucia]

As Fighting Rages On At The Front, Thousands Join Ukraine's Offensive Guard

>radio free europe

>The Grayzone

[Northern Seleucia]

i mean, when it comes to radio free europe...

Oh, no I’m not denying their bias. I’m just saying that the guy who fervently supports Sputnik and RT is one to be talking.

He quoted Max Blumenthal, that's enough.

[Supreme Algerstonia]

i would trust greyzone any day over western propaganda made by the same people that lied about iraq

So you’re going to trust the people who lied about Ukraine?

i'm sure it was just a mistake, probably some intern, russia is under a lot of pressure due to their existential conflict with the west and mistakes will inevitably happen, just cut them some slack

[Northern Seleucia]

So you’re going to trust the people who lied about Ukraine?

i'm sure it was just a mistake, probably some intern, russia is under a lot of pressure due to their existential conflict with the west and mistakes will inevitably happen, just cut them some slack

A terrible mistake, of course.

[Tarsonis]

i'm sure it was just a mistake, probably some intern, russia is under a lot of pressure due to their existential conflict with the west and mistakes will inevitably happen, just cut them some slack

A terrible mistake, of course.

Have you learned nothing about algerstonia?

[Lativs]

i'm sure it was just a mistake, probably some intern, russia is under a lot of pressure due to their existential conflict with the west and mistakes will inevitably happen, just cut them some slack

A terrible mistake, of course.

When you have to lie a lot and you can't make a mistake like that, there have been cases when they accidentally told the truth, but no one believed in it.

[Northern Seleucia]

A terrible mistake, of course.

Have you learned nothing about algerstonia?

I do, I replied with sarcasm. My apologies, I should have been clearer.

---

A terrible mistake, of course.

When you have to lie a lot and you can't make a mistake like that, there have been cases when they accidentally told the truth, but no one believed in it.

Да, я знаю.

[The Two Jerseys]

So you’re going to trust the people who lied about Ukraine?

i'm sure it was just a mistake, probably some intern, russia is under a lot of pressure due to their existential conflict with the west and mistakes will inevitably happen, just cut them some slack

Come on Alger, you can't just copy other people's posts like that!

[Thermodolia]

Turkish MP hints at possibility of Finland's NATO Application being ratified on Wednesday, although it could also happen on Tuesday

With that Finland should be a member of NATO by the end of next month as Hungary has approved of their membership

[Corrian]

Any word on whats going on with Avdiivka? Its almost surrounded like Bakhmut is on the live map but ive heard basically nothing about it.

I think the "surrounding" there is a lot less tight than Bakhmut is, so its less talked about. Plus Russia isn't advancing there nearly as fast as Bakhmut. I actually think the lines went backwards a bit there recently.

[Picairn]

Ukraine Claims Battle for Bakhmut Is 'Stabilizing' As Russian Forces Stall

Its definitely slower than it was, but I don't know if I'd call it stalled.

Agreed. They move at a snail's pace, but there are gains still every week.

[Picairn]

Speaking of which, Russian forces have continued their advances in the south, securing more of the southern neighbourhoods, as well as advancing along the river towards the city centre.

[Hidrandia]

Do we know casualties for this month?

[Democratic Communist Federation]

Didn't know. Honestly they don't use the language that other MLs use when defending Russia. They use language and arguments i'd expect more from MAGA and alt-right neo-fascists.

Putinism is not Marxism Leninism. Rather, Putinism, especially considering that Putin's favorite philosopher (the Russian fascist Ivan Ilyin) was proudly a fascist, has been moving in a fascist direction for some time. Marxism Leninism, on the other hand, was founded by Stalin (and adopted with modifications by Mao). Stalin is sometimes called, by his intellectual opponents, a red fascist, but that issue is debatable. Even though I oppose Stalin's first principle, "socialism in one country" (as do all Trotskyists), I prefer not to use pejoratives.

Yet, Lenin himself, from his writings, would have strongly disagreed with many (perhaps most) of Stalin's theoretical framework (as did Trotsky). That doesn't make either Lenin or Trotsky flawless. They were just ordinary human beings. However, at least, as some critics have humorously observed, they were not Stalinists.

Nevertheless, most modern-day iterations of Marxism Leninism have become joined at the hip to Putinism. As I suggested earlier (using other terminology), this fact can best be explained by the idiom, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. To the majority of Marxist Leninists, only the West is imperialist, not Russia.

Consistent with Putin's affection for fascism and his desire to undermine Western imperialism, he has been supporting fascist and other far-right movements around the world. It is difficult to imagine that even Stalin would stoop so low. Actually, Stalin initially wanted to be friends with the West (considering that Russia was one of the Allies in World War II). It was the West which turned against him and initiated the Cold War.

[The North Polish Union]

It’s Time to Bring Back the Polish-Lithuanian Union

[Democratic Communist Federation]

I just got my third warning in two years in the american politics thread for calling out a marxist spewing drivel. Got attacked by 3-5 other marxists, got insults hurled at me and i'm pretty sure a socialist that attacks russia in this thread implied i should kill myself in that other thread, but i'm going to be the only one getting a warning because NS loves socialists or some shit.

Your conclusion makes no sense. Look at the classifications of the various moderators' nations. They run the political spectrum.

[United States Reborn]

You're not wrong tbh. Says a lot about the groups that Russia attracts that the rhetoric is practically the same between the Nazis and self-proclaimed Marxists.

I just got my third warning in two years in the american politics thread for calling out a marxist spewing drivel. Got attacked by 3-5 other marxists, got insults hurled at me and i'm pretty sure a socialist that attacks russia in this thread implied i should kill myself in that other thread, but i'm going to be the only one getting a warning because NS loves socialists or some shit.

If orostan started using language used more commonly amongst tankies unironically supporting russia, they'd never have to worry about being ridiculed like they are.

We can all read the reports and see that this wasn't the case.

Accept your warning and take it on the chin.

[Hispida]

You're not wrong tbh. Says a lot about the groups that Russia attracts that the rhetoric is practically the same between the Nazis and self-proclaimed Marxists.

I just got my third warning in two years in the american politics thread for calling out a marxist spewing drivel. Got attacked by 3-5 other marxists, got insults hurled at me and i'm pretty sure a socialist that attacks russia in this thread implied i should kill myself in that other thread, but i'm going to be the only one getting a warning because NS loves socialists or some shit.

If orostan started using language used more commonly amongst tankies unironically supporting russia, they'd never have to worry about being ridiculed like they are.

jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?

[Ifreann]

I just got my third warning in two years in the american politics thread for calling out a marxist spewing drivel. Got attacked by 3-5 other marxists, got insults hurled at me and i'm pretty sure a socialist that attacks russia in this thread implied i should kill myself in that other thread, but i'm going to be the only one getting a warning because NS loves socialists or some shit.

If orostan started using language used more commonly amongst tankies unironically supporting russia, they'd never have to worry about being ridiculed like they are.

jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?

I suggested that his posts were so divorced from reality as to be the product of ill-advised drug consumption and he read this as me telling him to kill himself, which is all part of a communist plot to get him banned from NSG by the socialist mods.

[-Astoria-]

It’s Time to Bring Back the Polish-Lithuanian Union

For those meeting a paywall...

In 1386, the last pagan ruler of Lithuania, Jogaila, married the child queen of Poland, Jadwiga, then in her early teens. The marriage created a political union between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which encompassed large parts of today’s Belarus and Ukraine. By doing so, it solved a twofold problem. One, it helped bring the vast Eastern European territories, including lands of the former Kyivan Rus’, into the fold of Western Christendom. Two, the union addressed the immediate security concern facing both Poles and Lithuanians: the threat of Teutonic Knights.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth would go on to become one of the largest countries in Europe and a fascinating laboratory of political governance, studied in some detail by the United States’ founding fathers, particularly in the Federalist Papers. After the end of the Jagiellonian dynasty, it transformed into an electoral monarchy, similar to the city-states of Italy yet operating on a vastly larger scale. The commonwealth’s legislature and local diets followed the principle of unanimity—not unlike the European Council does on many issues today. The commonwealth’s atmosphere of religious tolerance and freedom enjoyed by its nobility provided a stark counterpoint to the absolutist monarchies of Western Europe—not to speak of the tragic history that followed the commonwealth’s demise in 1795.

What if a similar political solution were available to the problems facing Ukraine and Poland today?

The argument for an explicit political union between the two countries is not based on nostalgia but on shared interests. To be sure, due to four centuries of common history within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, much of today’s Ukraine (and Belarus) shares far more of its past with Poland than it does with Russia, notwithstanding claims of Russian propagandists to the contrary and notwithstanding the fact that the relationship was oftentimes highly complicated, as illustrated by events of the 17th-century Deluge—most prominently by the Khmelnytsky uprising and its conflicting interpretations by Poles and Ukrainians.

Fast-forward to the present and to the near future, however. Both countries are facing a threat from Russia. Today, Poland is a member in good standing of the EU and NATO, while Ukraine is keen to join both organizations—not unlike the Grand Duchy of yesteryear, eager to become part of mainstream, Christianized Europe. Even if Ukraine’s war against Russia ends with a decisive Ukrainian victory, driving degraded Russian forces out of the country, Kyiv faces a potentially decades long struggle to join the EU, not to speak of obtaining credible security guarantees from the United States. The poorly governed, unstable countries of the Western Balkans, prone to Russian and Chinese interference, provide a warning about where prolonged “candidate status” and European indecision might lead. A militarized Ukrainian nation, embittered at the EU because of its inaction, and perhaps aggrieved by an unsatisfactory conclusion of the war with Russia, could easily become a liability for the West.

Imagine instead that, at the end of the war, Poland and Ukraine form a common federal or confederal state, merging their foreign and defense policies and bringing Ukraine into the EU and NATO almost instantly. The Polish-Ukrainian Union would become the second-largest country in the EU and arguably its largest military power, providing more than an adequate counterweight to the Franco-German tandem—something that the EU is sorely missing after Brexit.

For the United States and Western Europe, the union would be a permanent way of securing Europe’s eastern flank from Russian aggression. Instead of a rambling, somewhat chaotic country of 43 million lingering in no-man’s land, Western Europe would be buffered from Russia by a formidable country with a very clear understanding of the Russian threat. “Without an independent Ukraine, there cannot be an independent Poland,” Poland’s interwar leader, Jozef Pilsudski, famously claimed, advocating a Polish-led Eastern European federation including Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine—basically a recreation of the medieval commonwealth.

This is not fantasy talk. Early on during the war, Poland passed legislation allowing Ukrainian refugees to obtain Polish ID numbers, giving them thus access to a host of social and healthcare benefits normally reserved for Polish nationals. The Ukrainian government vowed to reciprocate, extending to Poles in Ukraine a special legal status not available to other foreigners. With over 3 million Ukrainians living in Poland – including a sizeable pre-war population – the cultural, social, and personal ties between the two nations are growing stronger every day.

There is also one obvious precedent for a political union that significantly upended the balance of power in the EU and jumped through many of the obstacles that a prospective Polish-Ukrainian Union would face: German reunification. Following the first free election in East Germany in March 1990, the new Christian Democratic government quickly negotiated a treaty establishing a monetary, economic, and social union between East and West Germany, effective July 1 of that year. Not only did the Deutsche mark become legal tender in East Germany, but East Germany also adopted West German legislation governing economic activity—from antitrust, labor, and environmental regulation to consumer protection—and proceeded to dismantle any lingering remnants of communist rule.

This was only the first step toward political unification. It was followed by East Germany acceding to Germany’s constitution, the Basic Law—much like the Saarland did when it joined West Germany in 1956. A complex unification treaty governed in minute detail which parts of former East German law would remain in effect and which ones would be superseded by West German law, how, and under what timelines. Simultaneously, an agreement between Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of 1990 cleared the path toward NATO and European Economic Community (EEC) membership for a unified Germany. In the EEC, German unification prompted a treaty revision, leading ultimately to Germany’s abandonment of its beloved Deutsche mark in favor of the euro.

There is no downplaying the complexity of the unification, particularly of its legal and regulatory aspects, which were complicated further by Germany’s European commitments. Yet the German example demonstrates that such an exercise is possible when sufficient political will exists. Less than 11 months from the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans became full-fledged citizens of the Federal Republic on Oct. 3, 1990.

There are some obvious differences between the Polish-Ukrainian situation of today and the German one of the early 1990s. For one, notwithstanding the shared culture, history, and linguistic connections—and the presence of a large Ukrainian population in Poland—the idea of “absorbing” Ukraine into Poland is an obvious nonstarter. Unlike in 1990, when East Germans contended themselves with embracing the existing West German Basic Law and, in fact, the entire legal and political system of their more developed democratic cousins, a Polish-Ukrainian union would require drafting a new constitutional document and building shared federal or confederal institutions—in addition to what would be a complex unification treaty.

Subsidiarity ought to be the guiding principle of such efforts, particularly because the purpose of the union would not be to efface Ukrainian identity or statehood—quite the contrary. Areas where Polish law should make it into the Ukrainian legal system, at the earliest opportunity, are those that are necessary for Ukraine’s effective functioning within the EU and its single market. There are other areas, however, where such harmonization is not necessary—either because they lie completely outside of the EU’s competencies or because Ukrainians could find ways to comply with EU law on their own terms within predefined timelines.
Arguably, the biggest challenge of German reunification involved the economic gap between the two constituent parts. Since 1990, more than $2 trillion is estimated to have been transferred from the West to the East, or around half of Germany’s annual GDP, much in the form of transfers through the welfare system. In real terms, East German incomes were roughly one third of those in the West—a similar difference to the one between Ukraine and Poland before the war. The main difference, of course, is the relative size of the two countries—whereas the population of East Germany was just a quarter of that of West Germany, Ukraine’s is larger than Poland’s.

It is not reasonable to expect the Polish welfare system to become a major vehicle of redistribution to the east; in fact, Polish taxpayers should not be paying the bill for Ukraine’s reconstruction and its catch-up growth at all. Besides Russian assets—particularly the $300 billion held by its central bank currently frozen in Western financial capitals—the EU and its affluent Western European member states will have to step up. But that is not news, regardless of the nature of the postwar political settlement. What is new about the idea of a Polish-Ukrainian Union is that its emergence would create a political and legal environment in which the money spent would not be directed at a country lingering in the EU’s waiting room but at a member state, with all the rigor and scrutiny that comes with it.

There are many potential objections. The central one is the idea’s realism. Why would Poles take on a radical enterprise of such proportions? And why would Western European nations acquiesce to (and largely pay for) the rise of a new European power that irrevocably shifts the EU’s center of gravity to the east?

The answer to the first question is simple: Russia’s aggression and its failure opens new opportunities for statecraft. Political leadership is about responding creatively to the challenges of one’s time, not about trying to apply an old toolbox (in this case, a 1990s-style approach to EU and NATO enlargements) to a new situation. A Polish-Ukrainian Union may well be the most straightforward way through which postwar Ukraine is turned into a stable, prosperous, and strong country that will be able to keep Russia at bay—something that is keenly in Warsaw’s interest.

As for the second question, note that Brussels, Berlin, and Paris have already made a commitment to enlarge the EU by granting Ukraine candidate status, with everything that it would entail. An explicit political union between Poland and Ukraine would make it impossible to stall and weasel out of that pledge, as one may expect they eventually will. Opposing such a union, furthermore, would mean opposing one of the basic attributes of Ukraine’s national self-determination, which European leaders have vowed time and again to protect.

That is where U.S. leadership comes into play. Given the investment already made into Ukraine’s success on the battlefield, which far exceeds Western European contributions, Americans have a keen interest in turning Ukraine into a success story, particularly as the war itself moves into the rearview mirror. Given old Europe’s chronic fecklessness, illustrated by the EU’s misadventures in the Balkans, Ukraine’s future is too important to be left in the hands of Brussels, Paris, and Berlin. If Warsaw and Kyiv were willing to step up and solve the Eastern European problem once and for all, the U.S. administration must have Poland’s and Ukraine’s backs.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Twitter: @DaliborRohac

[United States Reborn]

jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?

I suggested that his posts were so divorced from reality as to be the product of ill-advised drug consumption and he read this as me telling him to kill himself, which is all part of a communist plot to get him banned from NSG by the socialist mods.

This is your brain...

...this is your brain on Ukrainian nationalism.

[Adamede]

I suggested that his posts were so divorced from reality as to be the product of ill-advised drug consumption and he read this as me telling him to kill himself, which is all part of a communist plot to get him banned from NSG by the socialist mods.

This is your brain...

...this is your brain on Ukrainian nationalism.

What the fuck are you talking about?

[The North Polish Union]

It’s Time to Bring Back the Polish-Lithuanian Union

For those meeting a paywall...

In 1386, the last pagan ruler of Lithuania, Jogaila, married the child queen of Poland, Jadwiga, then in her early teens. The marriage created a political union between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which encompassed large parts of today’s Belarus and Ukraine. By doing so, it solved a twofold problem. One, it helped bring the vast Eastern European territories, including lands of the former Kyivan Rus’, into the fold of Western Christendom. Two, the union addressed the immediate security concern facing both Poles and Lithuanians: the threat of Teutonic Knights.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth would go on to become one of the largest countries in Europe and a fascinating laboratory of political governance, studied in some detail by the United States’ founding fathers, particularly in the Federalist Papers. After the end of the Jagiellonian dynasty, it transformed into an electoral monarchy, similar to the city-states of Italy yet operating on a vastly larger scale. The commonwealth’s legislature and local diets followed the principle of unanimity—not unlike the European Council does on many issues today. The commonwealth’s atmosphere of religious tolerance and freedom enjoyed by its nobility provided a stark counterpoint to the absolutist monarchies of Western Europe—not to speak of the tragic history that followed the commonwealth’s demise in 1795.

What if a similar political solution were available to the problems facing Ukraine and Poland today?

The argument for an explicit political union between the two countries is not based on nostalgia but on shared interests. To be sure, due to four centuries of common history within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, much of today’s Ukraine (and Belarus) shares far more of its past with Poland than it does with Russia, notwithstanding claims of Russian propagandists to the contrary and notwithstanding the fact that the relationship was oftentimes highly complicated, as illustrated by events of the 17th-century Deluge—most prominently by the Khmelnytsky uprising and its conflicting interpretations by Poles and Ukrainians.

Fast-forward to the present and to the near future, however. Both countries are facing a threat from Russia. Today, Poland is a member in good standing of the EU and NATO, while Ukraine is keen to join both organizations—not unlike the Grand Duchy of yesteryear, eager to become part of mainstream, Christianized Europe. Even if Ukraine’s war against Russia ends with a decisive Ukrainian victory, driving degraded Russian forces out of the country, Kyiv faces a potentially decades long struggle to join the EU, not to speak of obtaining credible security guarantees from the United States. The poorly governed, unstable countries of the Western Balkans, prone to Russian and Chinese interference, provide a warning about where prolonged “candidate status” and European indecision might lead. A militarized Ukrainian nation, embittered at the EU because of its inaction, and perhaps aggrieved by an unsatisfactory conclusion of the war with Russia, could easily become a liability for the West.

Imagine instead that, at the end of the war, Poland and Ukraine form a common federal or confederal state, merging their foreign and defense policies and bringing Ukraine into the EU and NATO almost instantly. The Polish-Ukrainian Union would become the second-largest country in the EU and arguably its largest military power, providing more than an adequate counterweight to the Franco-German tandem—something that the EU is sorely missing after Brexit.

For the United States and Western Europe, the union would be a permanent way of securing Europe’s eastern flank from Russian aggression. Instead of a rambling, somewhat chaotic country of 43 million lingering in no-man’s land, Western Europe would be buffered from Russia by a formidable country with a very clear understanding of the Russian threat. “Without an independent Ukraine, there cannot be an independent Poland,” Poland’s interwar leader, Jozef Pilsudski, famously claimed, advocating a Polish-led Eastern European federation including Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine—basically a recreation of the medieval commonwealth.

This is not fantasy talk. Early on during the war, Poland passed legislation allowing Ukrainian refugees to obtain Polish ID numbers, giving them thus access to a host of social and healthcare benefits normally reserved for Polish nationals. The Ukrainian government vowed to reciprocate, extending to Poles in Ukraine a special legal status not available to other foreigners. With over 3 million Ukrainians living in Poland – including a sizeable pre-war population – the cultural, social, and personal ties between the two nations are growing stronger every day.

There is also one obvious precedent for a political union that significantly upended the balance of power in the EU and jumped through many of the obstacles that a prospective Polish-Ukrainian Union would face: German reunification. Following the first free election in East Germany in March 1990, the new Christian Democratic government quickly negotiated a treaty establishing a monetary, economic, and social union between East and West Germany, effective July 1 of that year. Not only did the Deutsche mark become legal tender in East Germany, but East Germany also adopted West German legislation governing economic activity—from antitrust, labor, and environmental regulation to consumer protection—and proceeded to dismantle any lingering remnants of communist rule.

This was only the first step toward political unification. It was followed by East Germany acceding to Germany’s constitution, the Basic Law—much like the Saarland did when it joined West Germany in 1956. A complex unification treaty governed in minute detail which parts of former East German law would remain in effect and which ones would be superseded by West German law, how, and under what timelines. Simultaneously, an agreement between Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of 1990 cleared the path toward NATO and European Economic Community (EEC) membership for a unified Germany. In the EEC, German unification prompted a treaty revision, leading ultimately to Germany’s abandonment of its beloved Deutsche mark in favor of the euro.

There is no downplaying the complexity of the unification, particularly of its legal and regulatory aspects, which were complicated further by Germany’s European commitments. Yet the German example demonstrates that such an exercise is possible when sufficient political will exists. Less than 11 months from the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans became full-fledged citizens of the Federal Republic on Oct. 3, 1990.

There are some obvious differences between the Polish-Ukrainian situation of today and the German one of the early 1990s. For one, notwithstanding the shared culture, history, and linguistic connections—and the presence of a large Ukrainian population in Poland—the idea of “absorbing” Ukraine into Poland is an obvious nonstarter. Unlike in 1990, when East Germans contended themselves with embracing the existing West German Basic Law and, in fact, the entire legal and political system of their more developed democratic cousins, a Polish-Ukrainian union would require drafting a new constitutional document and building shared federal or confederal institutions—in addition to what would be a complex unification treaty.

Subsidiarity ought to be the guiding principle of such efforts, particularly because the purpose of the union would not be to efface Ukrainian identity or statehood—quite the contrary. Areas where Polish law should make it into the Ukrainian legal system, at the earliest opportunity, are those that are necessary for Ukraine’s effective functioning within the EU and its single market. There are other areas, however, where such harmonization is not necessary—either because they lie completely outside of the EU’s competencies or because Ukrainians could find ways to comply with EU law on their own terms within predefined timelines.
Arguably, the biggest challenge of German reunification involved the economic gap between the two constituent parts. Since 1990, more than $2 trillion is estimated to have been transferred from the West to the East, or around half of Germany’s annual GDP, much in the form of transfers through the welfare system. In real terms, East German incomes were roughly one third of those in the West—a similar difference to the one between Ukraine and Poland before the war. The main difference, of course, is the relative size of the two countries—whereas the population of East Germany was just a quarter of that of West Germany, Ukraine’s is larger than Poland’s.

It is not reasonable to expect the Polish welfare system to become a major vehicle of redistribution to the east; in fact, Polish taxpayers should not be paying the bill for Ukraine’s reconstruction and its catch-up growth at all. Besides Russian assets—particularly the $300 billion held by its central bank currently frozen in Western financial capitals—the EU and its affluent Western European member states will have to step up. But that is not news, regardless of the nature of the postwar political settlement. What is new about the idea of a Polish-Ukrainian Union is that its emergence would create a political and legal environment in which the money spent would not be directed at a country lingering in the EU’s waiting room but at a member state, with all the rigor and scrutiny that comes with it.

There are many potential objections. The central one is the idea’s realism. Why would Poles take on a radical enterprise of such proportions? And why would Western European nations acquiesce to (and largely pay for) the rise of a new European power that irrevocably shifts the EU’s center of gravity to the east?

The answer to the first question is simple: Russia’s aggression and its failure opens new opportunities for statecraft. Political leadership is about responding creatively to the challenges of one’s time, not about trying to apply an old toolbox (in this case, a 1990s-style approach to EU and NATO enlargements) to a new situation. A Polish-Ukrainian Union may well be the most straightforward way through which postwar Ukraine is turned into a stable, prosperous, and strong country that will be able to keep Russia at bay—something that is keenly in Warsaw’s interest.

As for the second question, note that Brussels, Berlin, and Paris have already made a commitment to enlarge the EU by granting Ukraine candidate status, with everything that it would entail. An explicit political union between Poland and Ukraine would make it impossible to stall and weasel out of that pledge, as one may expect they eventually will. Opposing such a union, furthermore, would mean opposing one of the basic attributes of Ukraine’s national self-determination, which European leaders have vowed time and again to protect.

That is where U.S. leadership comes into play. Given the investment already made into Ukraine’s success on the battlefield, which far exceeds Western European contributions, Americans have a keen interest in turning Ukraine into a success story, particularly as the war itself moves into the rearview mirror. Given old Europe’s chronic fecklessness, illustrated by the EU’s misadventures in the Balkans, Ukraine’s future is too important to be left in the hands of Brussels, Paris, and Berlin. If Warsaw and Kyiv were willing to step up and solve the Eastern European problem once and for all, the U.S. administration must have Poland’s and Ukraine’s backs.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Twitter: @DaliborRohac

Weird I didn't hit a paywall and I'm not a paying subscriber. Typically if I do hit a paywall I archive it myself, my apologies.