Ukraine has little chance of emerging victorious in the conflict against Russia, Polish Armed Forces Chief of General Staff Rajmund Andrzejczak has said.
“War always was, is, and there is nothing to indicate otherwise – a matter of politics, and in its determinants has a substantial number of economic factors: finance, infrastructure issues, social issues, technology, food production and a whole set of problems that must be put into this box to understand this conflict,” the general said.
“When I look at the conflict in Ukraine, I mainly see it through these political lenses, and unfortunately it does not look good,” Andrzejczak said.
The senior officer explained that from the perspective of the coming one-two year period at least, there is “nothing” to indicate that Russia will not have the resources to continue operations.
“Those financial instruments which it had before the conflict, the dynamics of spending, the effectiveness of sanctions, and the whole complex economic situation speak to the fact that Russia will have the money for this conflict,” he said.
Ukraine, on the other hand, “has huge financial problems,” according to Andrzejczak. “We know how much the country needs per month. We know what American assistance amounts to, that of the entire collective West amounts to. We also know what Polish assistance is in this area, because we are the second-largest donor and should probably be a major inspiration for others. The speed of attrition in the financial area is, in my opinion, unfavorable [to Kiev], unfortunately,” he stressed.
What’s more, Andrzejczak said, there’s nothing to indicate that the Ukrainians who fled the country last year are ready to return home and begin rebuilding the country.
Accordingly, he suggested, NATO allies and the entire collective West will have to use the upcoming alliance summit in Vilnius in July to demonstrate their “credibility.”
“If we are late, if we do not take advantage of this opportunity and do not show determination, we will not give Ukraine a chance to build its secure future,” he said.
Stressing that his status as a professional soldier obliges him to speak about the most unfavorable and difficult scenarios for the present crisis, Andrzejczak emphasized that the security situation today is “very bad, very dangerous for Poland.”
The senior officer also complained that many Western leaders still don’t seem to realize how far Ukraine is from “winning” against Russia, saying the Western bloc “just doesn’t have the ammunition, industry is not ready not only to send equipment to Ukraine, but to replenish our own stocks, which are melting. This awareness is not the same there as it is here on the Vistula River, and it must be communicated firmly, without an anesthetic, to everyone and in all forums, wherever possible, which is what I’m doing,” he said.
As one of America’s top allies in NATO, Poland has provided over $2.67 billion in direct military assistance to Ukraine over the past year, and has allowed for its territory to be used for the transfer of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of Western military hardware to Kiev, and training for Ukrainian troops. Polish media have also reported that large numbers of Poles have taken part in the fighting against Russia, with a report from November 2022 estimating that about 1,200 Polish nationals had been killed to that date, and the government creating a special 1,700-space “American-style cemetery” in Olsztyn, northeastern Poland for the dead.
Warsaw played an instrumental role in supporting the Euromaidan coup d’état in February 2014 which sparked the Ukraine crisis, supporting the Washington and Brussels-led push to break Ukraine off from interaction and cooperation with Russia and to push it toward Western institutions like the European Union and NATO.
But not all Poles are happy about the role their government has played in Ukraine, with some citing the financial costs of the economic war with Russia and the burden of hosting up to 1.3 million refugees. Others are critical of the Ukrainian government’s support for radical ultranationalist forces in Kiev, which have glorified Stepan Bandera – a Ukrainian fascist and Nazi collaborator whose militias murdered hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians, Jews, anti-fascist Ukrainians, and Red Army troops in western Ukraine during the Second World War.
According recent opinion polling, while 48 percent of Poles continue to support further military aid for Ukraine, over one third of respondents are now opposed to any further aid.