Polish press reactions to Russia’s appetite for Ukraine

For the Polish mainstream media, both right and left, there is no doubt that the aggression against Ukraine is in line with Russia's imperialist tradition

Polish press reactions to Russia’s appetite for Ukraine Fotó: Famille Bault

On the opposite side of the political divide, Gazeta Wyborcza, a left-wing daily, had a front page highlighting the “First sanctions against Russia”. “In response to Vladimir Putin’s recognition of the Donbass pseudo-statelets, the European Union has cut off the Russian central bank from the financial markets and Germany has suspended the commissioning of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline”, the newspaper says in the headline of the front-page article of Wednesday’s edition. Below, as if echoing Gazeta Polska codziennie’s attack on the attitude of the opposition, there is a reference to an article about the division of assets carried out between Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and his wife in 2013, whereby Morawiecki allegedly transferred real estate to his wife “before the 2015 elections”. The newspaper’s editorial on page 2 calls for “Europe to stand up as one for Ukraine, to support it not only politically, but also to arm it and help it economically”, and also for “Europe to impose the toughest sanctions”. But the editorial writer also criticises the Polish government for being formed “by politicians who attack the European Union and even demand that Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki sabotage it from within”, which is a reference to the action of the Minister of Justice against the rule of law mechanism and against the European Court of Justice’s ultra vires judgments. The sentence highlighted by Gazeta Wyborcza reads: “It must be said clearly today: whoever wants to weaken the European Union is acting in the interests of Russia. In the Polish government, there should be no place for such politicians.”

The daily Rzeczpospolita usually stands in opposition to the Morawiecki government too, but it is not so politically committed as Gazeta Wyborcza or Gazeta Polska codziennie, and it is also considered more serious and less flashy than the tabloid Fakt. On Wednesday, it published an article entitled “Putin is preparing for war”. The caption under the headline reads: “Russia recognises the independence of self-proclaimed statelets in eastern Ukraine. This considerably reduces the scope for diplomacy and opens the door to invasion. All the more so since the West’s sanctions are soft.” As can be read in the article from Rzeczpospolita, “History has accelerated. On Monday evening, the heads of the ministries in charge of the use of force and all those who have real power in Russia gathered around Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. According to a carefully written script, they told the commander-in-chief what he wanted to hear: that Ukraine was preparing to invade the territories that were detached from it in 2014, the so-called Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. And that this will be the prelude to the genocide of the Russian-speaking population. Unless Moscow comes to their rescue. (...) The risk of war is also fuelled by the fact that the authorities of the self-proclaimed republics, which control about a third of the area of the two oblasts, want to conquer the whole of these administrative units, including the strategic cities of Mariupol and Kramatorsk. Moscow does not dissociate itself from this. In an extraordinarily aggressive speech on Monday, Putin questioned the very right of an independent Ukrainian state to exist. ”

Being the newspaper of the economic elite, Rzeczpospolita noted on Wednesday that “All of Europe, including Poland, will pay the price of sanctions against Russia”. The article with this headline informs readers that Russia is the third largest non-EU market for Polish exports and Ukraine the fourth largest. In addition, 75% of Polish coal imports come from Russia, coal being the basic fuel for electricity production in Poland, even though there are also many mines in the country (but they are often not very profitable, hence the growing share of imports). The same goes for 55% of Polish gas imports, not including Russian gas imported from Germany, and 65% of oil imports.