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24.10.07
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Looking For New Friends In Poland
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By Dmitry Babich
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But Success is Doubtful
The upcoming change of government in Poland following recent elections led to a lot of hopeful comments from Russian foreign policy experts. “The results of the Polish elections are positive for Russia,” said Sergei Yastrzhembsky, special aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin on relations with the European Union. “The electoral promises of the party that won the elections are seen with optimism in Russia.”
Relations between Russia and Poland are currently in a stalemate, since Poland wants Russia to lift the embargo on Polish meat products that has been in force since 2005. Until Moscow softens its stand, Warsaw is maintaining a veto on negotiations on the new Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) between Russia and the EU, which is meant to replace the current PCA that will expire in December. The negotiations that were due to start at the end of 2006 were vetoed by the Kaczynski brothers, President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leaders of the Polish PiS (Law and Justice) party. In the recent election, PiS came in second, with 32.11 percent of the vote, trailing the Christian-Democratic Civic Platform party with 41.15 percent. However, in the opinion of most of the experts, the change of names in the Polish government may not mean a change of policy towards Russia.
“I expect the new government to mend relations with the EU and possibly with Germany, but I don’t really expect a change of policy towards Russia,” said Maria Przelomiec, a veteran political commentator on the Polish television channel TVP-3. “In fact, each of the big winning parties in this election has one or two prominent critics of Russia among its leading members.”
Indeed, the souring of relations between Poland and Russia started long before the Kaczynskis came to power in 2005. Poland’s open and enthusiastic support for the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004-2005 led to a hostile exchange of comments by Putin and then-Polish president Alexander Kwasniewski, who is currently the leader of the bloc of the Left and Democrats (LiD), which came third in these elections with 13.15 percent of the vote. Negotiations on deployment of a U.S missile defense system in Poland, which is seen as a threat by Russia, started in 2000, when the Polish defense ministry was headed by Bronislaw Komorowski, one of the Civic Platform’s top leaders and the most likely candidate for the chairmanship of the Polish parliament (Sejm). Komorowski, known for his tough stance on Russia’s attempts to preserve the old balance of forces in Europe, is seen as one of the main architects of NATO’s expansion not only to Poland in 1999, but also to the Baltic countries in 2002. In 2001, Komorowski made a lot of media noise around the alleged (but never proven) deployment of Russian nuclear missiles in the Kaliningrad Region, which borders northeastern Poland. Another prominent LiD leader is Janusz Onyszkiewicz, who served as Poland’s defense minister in the early 1990s and oversaw the movement of Poland’s armed forces from the Western border to the Eastern one, alienating Russia.
“So you see, every major winning party in this election has a ‘tough guy’ on Russia in its ranks,” said Sergei Romanenko, an expert on Eastern Europe at the Institute of Economy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Speaking about a swift improvement in relations in these conditions is just not serious. The sad fact is that a lot of the media and the expert community reveal a certain lack of professionalism when they rush from gloomiest pessimism to some sort of rosy expectations in a matter of days.”
When PiS emerged as the victor in the 2005 elections, a lot of Russian journalists and foreign policy experts predicted an improvement in relations since the Kaczynski brothers, representatives of nationalist radical right, “would not have to prove their patriotism by confronting Russia.” Likewise, this time there is no lack of optimistic prognosis. For example, Alexander Lipatov, a research fellow at the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, evaluates the Civic Platform’s position as “open and inclined to dialogue with Russia.” On the pages of the Russian daily Vremya Novostei, he opines that the Civic Platform and its leader Donald Tusk “let it be understood that they view the deployment of American missiles in Poland negatively.” The fact that the idea of deploying American ABM complexes in Poland was supported by the Polish parliament, in which PiS and the Civic Platform hold the majority, does not deter Lipatov from these conclusions.
“In fact, the Civic Platform never went as far as directly opposing the deployment of the ABM system,” commented Irina Kobrinskaya, an expert on Poland at the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO). “The Czechs said their condition for agreeing to have American ABMs on their territory was that the Americans should take Russia’s position into account. At the moment, holding the same position is about as much as we can expect from Poland. If Poles agree that ABMs are a problem in NATO-Russia relations and not just U.S.-Russia relations, this would already be a huge win for Russia.”
So much for Russia’s presumed “sympathizers” in the new Polish parliament. As far as Russia’s hidden “lobbyists” are concerned, their existence is very questionable, especially after the Kaczynski government “purged” all the bodies of state power and even most of the educational institutions of any people suspected of collaborating with the old pro-Soviet regime. In the opinion of Kobrinskaya, the campaign of lustration, which reached its zenith under the Kaczynskis, should not be viewed by Russia as something destroying all of its useful ties to Poland.
“In fact Russia does not need sympathizers in the Polish government,” Kobrinskaya said. “What we need is a normal European country, a responsible member of the EU that would not block our negotiations with the European Commission or try to pit the rest of the EU members against us.” |
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