Poland’s Infrastructure Plans In Ukraine Could Revive Its Historical Rivalry With Russia There

By Andrew Korybko

The military-strategic consequences might further reduce Russia’s interest in any political compromise that allows for this to happen.

The new chief of Poland’s State Treasury-owned Industrial Development Agency (IDA) recently revealed in a mid-September interview that their planned international department will prioritize Ukrainian infrastructure projects. Bartlomiej Babuska said that these could include the construction of a narrow-gauge railway to Odessa, a Polish Black Sea port there, and an air cargo terminal in Central Ukraine. All three would help open up new markets for Polish exports to Turkiye, the Levant, and North Africa.

He added that the Odessa railway project has already been discussed and could even take the form of building narrow- and broad-gauge railways side-by-side following Azerbaijan’s example. In connection with this, Babuska cited last summer’s decision to expand the Euroterminal Slawkow railway facility in southwestern Poland, which is significantly the EU’s only cargo hub adapted to handle broad-gauge trains from the former Soviet Union, into the bloc’s largest logistics hub to aid Ukraine’s reconstruction.

According to him, “Just as Poland’s raison d’état is to defend Ukraine against Russia, so too is Poland’s raison d’état to build its infrastructure eastward. Owning a seaport on the Black Sea for the first time in history is within our reach.” Just like the Grand Principality of Muscovy, the Tsardom of Muscovy, and then the Russian Empire all sought warm-water ports, so too did the Polish-Lithuanian Union and then the Commonwealth seek Black Sea ports, but they never succeeded. Here are some recent briefings:

* 16 April: “Evaluating Poland’s Informal Proposal To Lease Land & Ports From Ukraine”

* 23 April: “The Political Implications Of Poland Explicitly Planning To Profit From Ukraine”

* 6 May: “Ukraine Unexpectedly Invited Poland To Help Rebuild Its Maritime Sector”

* 21 May: “The ‘Three Seas Initiative’ Will Play A Prominent Role In Post-Conflict Europe”

* 21 June: “Poland’s Latest Megaproject Has Long-Term Anti-Russian Implications”

To summarize, Poland wisely concluded that economic diplomacy is a much less risky way to profit from post-war Ukraine than deploying troops there, which could be targeted by local ultra-nationalists due to their historical memory of what they consider to have been centuries of “Polish occupation”. Leveraging its role as Ukraine’s logistical lifeline and its gateway to the EU is thus seen as the means to the end of outmanoeuvring Germany for its reconstruction contracts and logistical access to Global South markets.

There are also military dimensions to this economic connectivity vision. The proposed narrow-gauge railway to Odessa would facilitate the dispatch of equipment and possibly even troops, the latter dependent on the Western security guarantees provided to Ukraine, in the event of another conflict. The nascent “military Schengen’s” de facto expansion to Ukraine could also strengthen Polish-Turkish military cooperation there and/or in the Black Sea given their roles as NATO’s third– and second-largest armies.

If the IDA’s three proposed projects of a narrow-gauge railway to Odessa, a Black Sea port there, and an air cargo terminal in Central Ukraine come to fruition, then it would amount to a major powerplay by Poland inside Russia’s Eastern European sphere of influence. The military-strategic consequences might thus further reduce Russia’s interest in any political compromise that allows for this to happen. In the event that it does, however, then a revival of the historical Polish-Russian rivalry in Ukraine is expected.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Voice of East.

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Categories: Analysis, Geopolitics, International Affairs

Tags: EU, Europe, Geopolitics, Germany, Poland, Russia, Ukraine