Poland keeps racking up strategic losses in the days after merging into a de facto confederation with Ukraine. First, Zelensky told the attendees at this week’s Davos Summit that they can literally take over whatever “particular region of Ukraine, city, community or industry” that they want, which suggested that he doesn’t feel comfortable with his Polish allies completely controlling his country. Then Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki demanded that Norway partially subsidize his country’s geopolitical project with Ukraine, presumably because Warsaw realized that the US-led West is unlikely to give it any of the approximately $300 billion in Russia’s foreign assets that they seized but will instead use those funds to buy more influence in Kiev via the scheme that Zelensky just proposed.

After being played by Ukraine and the US-led West in general, Poland is now getting played by Germany. Polish President Duda claimed just the other day that Berlin went back on its word to replace his country’s tanks that were sent to Ukraine with state-of-the-art Leopard 2A7 main battle tanks after it was reported last month that Warsaw gave Kiev literally half of its total arsenal (200 out of 400). Germany denied that any such deal was set in stone and reminded the public that it simply said that it would consider Poland’s request but that it would in any case require substantial time to process even if it agreed since it would have to manufacture them from scratch. Its spokesman also said that Germany only has 50 of those tanks that Poland demanded, so it clearly couldn’t supply over 200 to its neighbor.

These three strategic losses in a row, literally one after another and day by day, prove that Poland’s actually getting played by everyone. Its so-called “allies” knew that they could easily manipulate that country’s leadership into doing whatever they wanted in Ukraine by playing to their nostalgia for restoring the long-lost Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Blinded by these desires, the ruling “Law & Justice” (PiS per its Polish abbreviation) party surrendered Poland’s strategic autonomy to others and eagerly did their bidding. They expected to receive some illusory prestige that they could then spin to deceive their increasingly unhappy base, which they fear might “defect” by voting for genuinely nationalist parties during the fall 2023 elections in protest of PiS’ Ukrainization of their country.

The cold reality is now setting in that everyone was taking advantage of the Polish leadership’s imperial nostalgia to manipulate it into doing their bidding in Ukraine. Poland absorbed over 3,5 million Ukrainian refugees in the span of just three months and afforded them de facto citizenship rights (which includes very generous social benefits) so that they wouldn’t invade Western European countries like Germany. It then sent literally half of its tanks to Ukraine and before merging with its neighbor into a de facto confederation in the expectation that it would exercise hegemony over it, yet Zelensky just played them by asking the elite at the World Economic Forum to literally take over whatever “particular region of Ukraine, city, community or industry” that they want, which will erode Polish influence in Ukraine.

It’s very likely that Poland has done even more for Ukraine than has been publicly disclosed, all of which is being financed by its taxpayers’ hard-earned funds. Warsaw unrealistically expected that the US-led West would hand over the lion’s share of Russia’s $300 billion in stolen foreign assets so that Poland could take the lead in reconstructing Ukraine, yet any objective observer would have known that they’d rather keep it for themselves, including to finance their own corrupt projects in that country via Zelensky’s latest scheme. The Polish leadership is now left looking like the village idiot after everyone so effortlessly manipulated it into doing their bidding in Ukraine, which the Polish people are increasingly becoming aware of and might thus punish PiS at the polls during the fall 2023 elections.