I don't hold a doctorate in Ukrainian studies. What I do have is ten years worked in Africa and the Middle East – and it was those years, not any university lecture, that taught me to look at politics without sentiment. As I listened over the past years to our lovely tales of Polish-Ukrainian brotherhood, I honestly didn't know whether to be angry or to laugh. Because all that warmth kept shattering against a hard rule I learned down there, in the South, the painful way. It goes like this: you matter to someone only when you are an asset to be profited from, or a threat to be feared. If you are neither, you aren't even disregarded – you are simply something negligible in someone else's calculation. And today, watching how Kyiv treats Warsaw, I have an ever stronger sense that this is precisely the column we've been entered in.
A ledger instead of sentiment.
Let me say it plainly: this is not an indictment of Ukrainians, but a diagnosis of our own naivety. In 2022, aid to an invaded neighbour was self-evident and there is nothing to debate there. But already before that, and for years on end, we handed over our loyalty for free, bundled with the quiet assumption that gratitude was waiting for us on the other side. Well, gratitude is not a category in this game. Here I reach for Feliks Koneczny's old and controversial theory of the plurality of civilisations – not to pass judgment on nations, because that is its weakest and most dangerous side, but to name a certain type of order of power: one in which only strength and interest count, and gratitude or loyalty are words from an entirely different dictionary. A state that enters into a relationship with such an order, carrying a heart in its hands instead of a ledger, is asking to be disregarded.
Three theories of a single coldness.
Let's start with the fact, because the fact is hard. On 26 May this year, President Zelensky granted one of the elite units of Ukraine's special forces an honorary name invoking the "Heroes of the UPA" – the very formation that the Polish Sejm, by its resolution of 22 July 2016, found guilty of the genocide of more than a hundred thousand Poles. The question is not whether it hurt, because it did. The question is: why did Kyiv do it, knowing exactly how we would react. I offer three theories. The first: it was a deliberate provocation aimed at us, a test of our patience. The second, sadder one: it was no provocation at all, but a total disregard – Zelensky has heard the Polish "non possumus" so many times that he has simply stopped registering it. And the third, the most interesting, and one for which I admit I drew inspiration from Marek Budzisz's analyses – that it was not a message to us at all.
A signal sent over our heads.
Because if you read Ukrainian moves the way Budzisz tells us to read all the politics of the East – through the prism of a strategic culture in which information and the play of appearances are a weapon, not an ornament – then the whole row with Poland falls into place as a package of signals addressed to Moscow. In it, Ukraine says roughly this. Signal one: "Look, Russia, how far we reach." And reach it does – on 3 June, the opening day of the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Ukrainian drones, after a flight of more than a thousand kilometres, struck the St. Petersburg oil terminal and the Baltic Fleet warships off Kronstadt, and on 6 June, the day the forum closed, more than a hundred and forty of them were shot down over the Leningrad region. That is a hard demonstration: we can reach you even in the middle of your own economic gala. Signal two: "Look how easily we can fall out with Poland and with all of Europe." And since – the Kyiv argument continues – we'll have to hand you part of the Donbas anyway, and the Americans and Europeans are already laying claim to the rest of our rare-earth metals, because we signed the raw-materials deal with Washington back in April 2025, then perhaps we could come to some arrangement? After all, we know each other well. In this game Poland is not the addressee. It is a prop. And let me say it honestly: in my view this courtship will lead nowhere, and the war is in any case scripted for years, not months. But the very fact that we are playing the role of a prop in it should sober us up.
A war you can profit from.
And here we come to something that is spoken of far too rarely in Poland. The question "why is this war lasting so long" also has the most down-to-earth answer: because war is something you can profit from. This is not about some cheap conspiracy, but about hard economics. In three years Ukraine has built from nothing an industry that more than one Western state can only dream of – in 2025 it produced millions of drones, and since February this year it has been opening a network of export centres for its arms sector across Europe, shifting from the role of aid recipient to that of technology supplier. That is a real, countable asset. But there is also the other, darker side of the same coin, which I see through my African glasses. Ukrainian military intelligence is by now sometimes a player far beyond Europe – in the summer of 2024, its spokesman all but openly admitted involvement in the destruction in Mali of a column of Russian Wagner mercenaries, after which Bamako and Niamey, in retaliation, broke off relations with Kyiv. So I put forward a thesis, which I won't sell as a certainty: Ukraine is learning to export security – drones, instructors, entire operations – into those "strange corners of the world" where, until quite recently, Wagner ruled. And a state that can sell security in Africa will feel that much less bound by gratitude towards a neighbour who for years gave it everything for nothing.
The cacophony of recent days.
Onto all of this is layered the din of the past week, in which it is easy to lose all sense of proportion. Dmytro Yarosh, the former leader of Right Sector and today the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, posted on his profile an entry calling on Poles to "accept that on Ukrainian soil they were occupiers – just as the Russians are today," and reminding Ukrainians of their "absolute right to destroy invaders." Many here read it outright as a claim to the right to murder Poles – and it is hard to be surprised by that reaction. But let's keep our measure: this is the voice of a private radical, not of the Ukrainian state, and it didn't reach any great audience. None of which excuses it in the slightest, but it does compel us to distinguish noise from policy. And the policy is visible elsewhere. At the start of June a Ukrainian delegation came to Warsaw with the head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov – and left essentially with nothing. The exhumations are, admittedly, finally getting under way after years of moratorium, work is beginning at Huta Pieniacka, there are approvals for Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka – but a gesture counted in single villages will not close a reckoning that has a hundred thousand victims standing on its other side. It was best captured by a T-shirt I saw somewhere: "The victims don't want revenge. The victims want remembrance." And that's it. That much, no less.
Stop being a prop.
So what is to be done about it? Taking offence will certainly not be enough. You don't get out of the "negligible" column by showing resentment – resentment is precisely the confirmation that someone failed to appreciate us, and therefore that we are still playing someone else's game, by someone else's rules. You get out of it differently: by becoming, to your partner, either indispensable or inconvenient, and best of all both at once. And we have cards to play with. The lion's share of Western aid flows through our territory; in Rzeszów and Gdańsk we have hubs without which this war would look different; on our market Ukrainians are placing billions that will now stay here. These are not gifts to be handed out in the name of brotherhood. These are cards. It is high time we started playing them – coolly, without sentiment and without illusions, exactly the way their hand is played by those who today have entered us in the "irrelevant" column. Only then will we stop being a prop in someone else's spectacle, and become a party you simply have to talk to.
The hard background to this text consists of: the resolution of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland of 22 July 2016 recognising the Volhynia massacre as genocide and the findings of the IPN (Institute of National Remembrance) as to the number of victims; reports by the “Kyiv Independent,” “Rzeczpospolita” and Notes from Poland from the turn of May and June 2026 about the naming of a Ukrainian unit after the “Heroes of the UPA” and about the reaction of the Polish authorities; accounts by “The Moscow Times,” NPR and the “Kyiv Independent” of the Ukrainian strikes near St. Petersburg and Kronstadt on 3 and 6 June 2026, during the Economic Forum held there; information about the American-Ukrainian raw-materials deal signed on 30 April 2025 and about European efforts to secure Ukrainian titanium and lithium; the Carnegie Endowment analysis of November 2025 concerning the operations of Ukrainian intelligence in Africa, and Al Jazeera's reports of Mali and Niger breaking off relations; and finally accounts by Euronews and “Rzeczpospolita” of Kyrylo Budanov's visit to Poland and the resumption of exhumation work. Feliks Koneczny's theory of civilisations and Marek Budzisz's analyses I reach for as interpretive frames, not as proof — and all the assessments I take upon myself.
