Putin Warns Poland of Consequences of Expansion

The scenario has been discussed for a while among think tanks and specialists, but now the Russian government has put it on the table: a takeover of western Ukrainian territory by Poland. Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) briefed a meeting of the Russian Security Council July 21 on what the his Service knows about the adjustments that Poland is making in view of the inevitable defeat of the Kiev regime in eastern Ukraine.

“The Polish authorities are getting more intent on taking the western parts of Ukraine under control by deploying their troops there,” he stated. Naryshkin indicated that Warsaw plans to do this in the context of the Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian security initiative, also called the Lublin Triangle. This organism was created in 2020, before the Russian march into the Donbass. “We see that plans also call for significantly increasing the number of personnel of the combined Lithuanian-Polish-Ukrainian brigade, which operates under the auspices of this so-called Lublin Triangle,” he concluded. “We believe that it is necessary to keep a close eye on these dangerous plans of the Polish authorities.”

Vladimir Putin, who was chairing the National Security meeting, commented that “The outlook is clear: In the event Polish forces enter, say, Lvov or other Ukrainian territories, they will stay there, and they will stay there for good.” This is nothing new, as following WWI, Polish units occupied Lvov and adjacent territories that had been part of Austria-Hungary. It also annexed certain historical Russian provinces. In 1920, Poland captured part of Lithuania, and later on, following the Munich Agreement with Hitler in 1938, it took part in the partition of Czechoslovakia.

Putin then warned: What the Kyiv regime does, “is none of our business,” but “Belarus is part of the Union State, and launching an aggression against Belarus would mean launching an aggression against the Russian Federation. We will respond to that with all the resources available to us.“ “I can tell you that this is an extremely dangerous game, and the authors of such plans should think about the consequences.”