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Due to historical reasons, there is a certain fear of Russia amongst the population. For years this fear was somewhat subdued although always present in Poland's defense strategy. However, since the beginning of the latest war in Ukraine, militaristic mood has increased dramatically, as has a general support for defense spending and increased militarization of the country.

Poland, as a NATO member with borders on Ukraine, Russia and Belarus has played an active role in urging more aggressive action towards Russia (and, to a lesser extent, Belarus), not only in domestic policy, but also in the European Union and NATO.

Military expenditure has more than doubled between 2022 and 2023 and is currently the highest it has ever been. In terms of percentage of gross domestic product, in 2023, Poland had the highest expenditure in the European Union and has one of the highest percentages in the world, surpassing even the United States. (Only Ukraine, Russia and Israel, as well as Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Kuwait have a higher percentage.)

Although the government tries very hard to convince the world that Poland is a very prosperous country, manipulating statistics to claim that an unrealistically low level of income is possible to survive on, thus setting the official poverty level well below what is needed to survive, the fact is that due to rising prices, more and more people are barely able to make ends meet. While the government pumps more and more money into military expenditure, constantly pointing to the immense threat posed by Russia, large areas of the public budget is underfinanced. There never seems to be enough money to give raises to essential workers such as nurses, teachers and other school and hospital personnel, who often organize strikes and protests demanding increases to their scandalously low salaries, which usually fall below the average pay and sometimes are not too much above minimum. Working class families are hit especially hard as many cannot afford the private medical care that many wealthier people use to avoid long queues at public health facilities. Worse yet, extreme poverty amongst senior citizens is growing rapidly and in the near future will explode as pensions drop significantly for large parts of the population.

While the government never has money for any of these things, it tries to instill fear in the population to justify unprecedented military expenditure and the increased presence of foreign troops around the country. There are well over 10,000 American troops in Poland and a similar number of NATO troops. It is currently sending its 45th package of military aid to Ukraine and plans to open up more training of Ukrainian soldiers in Poland. Military aid to Ukraine has amounted to more than 4 billion euros.

Although Poland loudly announced its aid to Ukrainian refugees, we witnessed how in fact, aid to Ukrainian refugees was largely organized by private people and also organized through a large number of non-profit organizations – again, largely funded by private people. Lots of the promised aid never materialized – for example, with housing for refugees in Warsaw. (Through our tenants' organization we are currently helping lots of Ukrainians screwed over with the lack of help or the temporary nature of the little help actually given.) Even though a lot of the widely-pronounced „help” to refugees was fictious, over the past few months, the Polish hawks, led by Radoslaw Sikorski, have announced numerous ideas to get young men out of Poland and to the front lines in Ukraine. These include refusing to make or extend documents for them and cutting any aid they might receive. Sikorski has proposed that these policies be adopted on an EU-wide level. Lately he has been making many disparaging remarks about these „draft dodgers”, insisting that their place is in Ukraine, on the front lines. It should be noted that „draft dodgers” apparently include any Ukrainian male, regardless of the fact that before the Russian invasion started, there were hundreds of thousands of these people already living and working in Poland. Even those who have Polish residency fear that the authorities will take measures making it more difficult to remain in Poland due to the militarists macho beliefs that all able-bodied men should put their lives on the line for the idea of national sovereignty.

Of course, this also has a class aspect as poorer people tend to have fewer ways to escape and are more likely to be used as cannon fodder by any military, especially in such war times. It is no coincidence that at the same time, both the government and the far-right try to exaggerate the negative impract that Ukrainian refugees have had in Poland, with the far-right Konfederacja Party mostly basing its electoral campaigns on anti-Ukraine and anti-immigrant sentiments. There is a growing right-wing movement which opposes any military aid to Ukraine, mostly due to its anti-Atlantist stance, but mainly communicating its positions using anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Speaking of anti-immigrant rhetoric, it often intersects with the politics of the Polish government in relation to issues such as the militarization of borders. Prior to the last parliamentary elections, a scandal broke out about the corrupt sale of Polish visas on a rather large scale and the current Premier Tusk started a very racist campaign around this issue. Using the fact that many of the recipients of such visas were from India, other Asian countries and the Middle East, Tusk responded with promises to crack down on not just illegal immigration, but immigration as such. During the former government of Tusk and his party, Poland tightened its borders and presented itself as a leader in preventing immigration to the EU. It was decided that the EU border agency Frontex be located in Warsaw.

Prior to the onset of the current war in Ukraine, many people immigrated to Poland from countries such as Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. Many of them came because they were escaping political persecution or were in search of better earnings. Many people who were jailed in Belarus sought asylum here. Currently, the government does not care about Russian people who might be draft-dodgers or be running away from Putin's regime. Many politicians have publically voiced the opinion that anti-war Russians need to stay in Russia and fight Putin. This is regardless of whether such people have been targetted for doing so. More recently, many in the government have begun to view immigration from Belarus as a problem, suspecting that there are „agents of Putin” coming from Belarus. We can also recall the tense months when refugees were being pushed back across the border to Belarus in what Polish government officials described as a „hybrid war” aimed at Poland and the European union. The actions of the Polish government on the border were blantantly racist, particularly when compared to the treatment of Ukrainian refugees at the same time. The fear-mongering was mostly fuelled by racism and issues of class (as wealthier people from the same countries arrived here more easily) and resulted in increased policing of the border. Now Sikorski and Co. want to turn the border into a highly militarized zone.

In early May, Poland announced its Shield-East project to militarize its border with Belarus at a cost of nearly 3 billion dollars. Initially, the government planned to put mines in the border zone. (The photo taken of Deputy Defense Minister Cezary Tomczyk presenting the plans in Warsaw clearly shows the mine field labelled as such.) This caused an international scandal as Poland is a signatory to the Ottawa Treaty which prohibits the use of land mines. Donald Tusk has had to walk back these announcements and denied that they were planning to use them. At the same time, Sikorski contradicted Tusk claiming that they would only use them „if they had to”. It is too early to tell whether or not we will see land mines on the border, but the initial plans which include them are very telling of the government's willingness to use the most barbaric methods in fortifying its borders. Again, all this at great cost as it will effect spending on many basic needs for poor and working class people.

(The photo on this article shows the presentation of the Shield-East project, complete with mine fields.)

Finally, Tusk has recently been warmongering, spreading theories about Russian saboteurs in the European Union conducting arson and various acts of terrorism to destabilize these countries. (One can refer to this article in the Guardian as a background. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/30/europe-on-high-ale...) The acts of the Polish government, in particular, Donald Tusk, who almost immediately declared with certainly that Russian burned down a shopping center in Warsaw, serve to instill fear in people and try to justify more military expenditure and hawkish behaviour. Fortunately, quite a number of people, including many in the local city government, are extremely credulous of these conspiracy theories, especially in light of what they know was happening in that center.

The story of the shopping center that was burned down in Warsaw is that in 2009, the city government tried to clear the two largest markets from the center of Warsaw. In 2010, vendors who formerly had worked in these markets were able, if they could pay the price, to get stalls in the newly opened Marywilska complex (which, contrary to some media reports, was not the biggest shopping mall in Poland or even in Warsaw). Many of the vendors who could not pay the price moved to locations even further to the center or outside Warsaw). Among the people trading in the Marywilska center were Poles and a large number of Vietnamese and Ukrainian people. One cannot assume that all people working there were small family business owners. There were 1400 stalls and, although some were owned and run by individuals and families working there, including many immigrants, others were owned by larger companies that employed people, sometimes in unfavourable or even illegal working conditions. However, we can say that a couple of thousand people relied on this shopping center as their main or only source of income and the loss of the center was a tragedy for many who worked there.

What you won't read in the foreign press (or even the Polish press these days, which clearly prefers the Premier's conspiracy theory) is that for the last few months, there have been many protests of the people who work in the hall, including several protests in the center of Warsaw, at City Hall, etc. These were rent protests as the rent was raised to an incredibly high amount in this center recently. So high that the cost of a stall in the center exceeded the price of the fanciest retail spaces in town, in the most prestigious places and became several times higher than the average retail rent in the center of Warsaw. We are talking about an unattractive building in a place that is in a previously unattractive area of the city. Of course, a lot has changed since 2010, with the recent boom in property speculation and development activity reaching to many areas on the outskirts of the city, including areas that were formerly sites of factories with little-to-no infrastructure around them.

The protestors went to City Hall because the shopping center was built on city property and the city initiated the project to build the center to get the vendors out of the city center. The City promised to hold „mediation meetings”, which brought nothing. Some of the vendors were losing money and had problems getting out of their contracts which had unheard-of two-year termination periods. The manager of the center proposed to the vendors at some time that they could move to some other location outside of Warsaw. Then, the shopping center mysteriously burned down in a very clearly planned arson.

Knowing that the majority of arsons in Warsaw by some „coincidence” appear in places that are „developing” and soon after lead to new and expensive real estate projects, a more plausible conspiracy theory (and one that many people believe) is that they tried to get rid of all the vendors by charging exorbitant rents that would bankrupt them and when they were in debt, they would have a legal reason to terminate the leases (that also had a long termination clause for the owners). Perhaps it would just be easier to collect the insurance money after the thing burned down and develop something else on this property. It is now in the proximity of other development projects.

Despite the fact that many people think that this is a likely scenario, the media has picked up Tusk's claim that this is Russian sabotage. The information reported is often contradictory and mysteriously. According to different reports, the CIA has confirmed that the Russian GRU is recruiting people in Poland (including Ukrainian citizens apparently), to commit arson and other attacks. Several people have been arrested and charged with terrorism. (It is actually unclear how many people – some reports say 9, some say 12 – and what exactly they are charged with doing. Arsons mentioned include a paint factory and a warehouse containing Euro-pallets.)

We won't deny that there are paid arsonists in Poland. Businesses have been doing this for years to get insurance claims. We also won't even deny that Russia uses agents to destabilize things in Poland and there are people who suspect a number of people of this, including some more important political names. However, given the long history of governments and especially its intelligence agencies manufacturing incidents to escalate conflict and even to start wars, we cannot exclude the possibility that this is what is really going on. In any case, there is little known about these arrests of suspected terrorists except that it was said that none of the arrested was charged in connection with the Marywilska fire, with Tusk claimed with upmost certainty was an act of Russian sabotage.

With all of these things and with the completely unhinged Putin posturing and making more and more threats towards Poland, war fever is growing. Even supposedly left political formations talk about how it is important to support NATO operations and spend money on the increasing militarization of the country. If this militarization is costing average working class people in this country a lot, it is costing even more to working class Russians as Putin is throwing the country into severe financial straits with funding his war. On the other hand, Putin knows that people might rebel, so he has taken many measures to give things to the working class, to buy off their discontent. In Poland, the government only threatens to cut social programs and channel more money into defense, something that the working class feels but is not entirely conscious of. The effectiveness of fear has been stronger than any realization of the real price of increased militarization.

As this situation continues, we hope that something will have to give, before we find ourselves in the middle of a conflict which will lead to lots of confused young people going off to fight a war in the interest of power and capitalism instead of fighting for the increased power of the working class and for international solidarity against the madmen of the world and those who benefit from the business of death and destruction.

Laure Akai
ZSP Warsaw Union