Year in Review: Poland and Ukraine defy Putin to emerge as ‘new powers in defense in Europe’
Joel Gehrke
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has wrought “a new geopolitical reality” in Europe, according to a senior European defense official, but not the one that Kremlin officials expected.
“The balance is definitely being shifted towards the east,” Czech Deputy Defense Minister Tomas Kopecny told the Washington Examiner, referring to “the rise of Poland and, of course, Ukraine as the new powers in defense in Europe.”
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Russian President Vladimir Putin expected the invasion would “return and strengthen” Russia’s dominion over the territories conquered at the founding of the modern Russian Empire under Peter the Great. Instead, the Kremlin accelerated the coalescence of power in Central and Eastern European states once erased from political maps by Russian imperialists of centuries past.
Kopecny is wary of any direct analogies to the historic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose boundaries once included most of modern Ukraine — “historical analogies are very, a very sensitive issue in Europe,” he explained — but he isn’t shy about the latent potential of Central European capitals willing to pool their resources in a crisis.
“At the same time, this union was the only one that captured and kept Moscow for some time in history,” he said, referring to an early 17th-century conflict. “Regardless of how it was formed in the history, this unity and brotherhood between Poland and Ukraine is just indisputable. And it will remain for a very, very long time because every single Ukrainian knows that it was thanks to Poland that some of his relatives were safe.”
The states of the region have had their own difficulties, but they have set aside those bad memories, by and large, due to a common recognition of the threat posed by the Kremlin.
That dynamic has received less global attention than German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s stunning announcement of “Zeitenwende,” the impending rearmament of Germany in response to the Kremlin’s breaking of the peace between states in Europe. But it could be more consequential on the continent.
“There have been some very, very important changes for the good, for the positive side, in how we perceive it, in Germany and in Germany’s defense posture,” Kopecny said. “They could start to be an important player, but not the leading one. Really, the most heavyweight bloc will be the one of Ukraine and Poland because, together, they will be far more powerful.”
The resuscitation of such a bloc has a historical precedent, though not quite a successful one. “In 1922 there existed a wise plan for a great Baltic bloc from Poland to Finland, a joint defensive alliance; discussions culminated at a conference held in Warsaw,” historian John Lukacs recalled in his 1953 history of The Great Powers and Eastern Europe. “But political squabbles within Finland and Poland, the two anchor states, and Lithuanian-Polish enmity made all plans dissolve into thin air; only a frail Estonian-Latvian Alliance remained.”
Most of those states now are members of NATO, except for Finland (which is in the process of joining NATO, alongside Sweden) and Ukraine, which aspires to join NATO. “That was unfortunate that this alliance [described by Lukacs] could not be built,” another senior European official said. “But we are building another one at the moment while Finland and Sweden are joining NATO. Anchor nation is U.S.”
Poland, as another member of the trans-Atlantic alliance, relies on the nuclear guarantee provided by the United States in conjunction with France and the United Kingdom. Yet Warsaw’s conventional military interests now far surpass what it obtains from the U.S., leading to new links between U.S. allies in Central Europe and Northeast Asia.
“Japan and South Korea are increasingly realizing that their security is going to be tied up with the degree to which the United States remains internationalist,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper said. “That means that they can’t just focus on East Asia. They have to focus on supporting some U.S. allies as well, both as a hedge against the possibility that the U.S. wouldn’t be as engaged, but also as a forcing function to ensure … that it’s a little easier for the U.S. to stay engaged, because its allies are picking up a little more of the burden than they have heretofore.”
Japan has played an important role in the Group of Seven, the format by which the world’s seven largest industrialized democracies have imposed severe economic penalties on Russia. Meanwhile, South Korea has emerged as “the fastest growing kid on the block of the European defense market,” according to Kopecny, who oversees Czech defense industrial cooperation.
“The confidence of Europeans towards South Korean defense industry has grown substantially,” Kopecny said. “It started with Estonia, Finland, then Norway, then Poland with howitzers. Now, main battle tanks. Those are all products that are very well perceived and … those products will be the building blocks of the new axis of military power of Poland, as well as some of the other countries.”
Those relationships could ease the strain on the U.S. defense industrial base, which has expanded and directed vast military stockpiles toward Ukraine, even as U.S. strategists brace for the possibility of a clash with China over Taiwan in the years to come.
“For a long time, the U.S. didn’t have to worry so much about whether it could manage challenges in two regions at the same time,” Cooper said. “And so I do think there’s a realization that the U.S. maybe can’t do it all. And so, both, the allies are going to have to help each other more, but also to the extent that the allies can make it easier for the U.S. to pivot from one region to another when there’s need to do so — that really is a force multiplier.”
The most visible example of forces multiplying will come in Ukraine, Kopecny predicted.
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“They will be buying them for the next war to come, and the structure of the military will be so huge that this will be what will make them the biggest,” he said, before acknowledging that this dynamic could make some traditional European powers uncomfortable. “It’s natural for, say, the current powers not to want to be overshadowed in some respects. But at the same time, it’s for the better for all of us here in the EU, so at the end of the day, I believe that it will also be seen as a good thing in Paris and Berlin.”