NATO Prepares to Risk Polish Troops on Foolhardy Foray into Ukraine

Poland once ruled an empire that spanned the Baltic states, Ukraine and Belarus — and may harbour dreams of rebuilding it. Independent geopolitical researcher and writer Brian Berletic warned that plan would go badly for Warsaw.

The US is pushing Poland into an ill-advised scheme to seize large parts of Ukrainian territory in case Kiev's forces collapse in the face of the Russian military operation — a former US Marine says.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday that Poland was attempting to build up the most powerful army in NATO after the US — and was still bent on a widely-reported scheme to occupy and possibly annex the western regions of Ukraine around the city of Lvov.

Warsaw has signed deals to buy tanks and other weapons from Germany, the US and South Korea.

"In addition, there are plans to create on a regular basis a so-called Polish-Ukrainian compound, ostensibly to ensure the security of western Ukraine, and in fact - for the subsequent occupation of this territory," Shoigu added.

Analyst Brian Berletic told Sputnik that the US had in previous months been "positioning Poland as the next proxy in line for Washington to use to wage a proxy war against Russia with."

"They're doing this at the expense of resources that could be better invested in Poland for the Polish people," the former US Marine said. "This is a military build-up that is going to take many years to be completed. And even when it is completed, even though it would technically have the largest military in Europe, so did Ukraine at the beginning of the Russian special military operation. It went very poorly for Ukraine. It will go very poorly for Poland."

Meanwhile, Poland is building up forces on the border with Russia's ally Belarus, claiming that Wagner PMC group troops in exile there are preparing to invade its territory.

While NATO has repeatedly crossed its own red lines on which types of arms it will supply to Ukraine — and allowed former servicemen in its armed forces to fight there as mercenaries — the US-led military bloc insists that it does not want war with Russia and will not intervene directly.

“I'm not so sure that they would hesitate to send troops over the border. They would send them someplace in Ukraine where Russian forces aren't, just like they did in Syria,” Berletic said. “They would create a buffer zone, and that would give what's left of Ukraine's military some sort of safe haven to operate in.”

Under a mooted plan for a “union” between Poland and Ukraine, “the border would, for all intents and purposes, be erased. Then they would be able to take the safe haven into what was exclusively Polish territory.”

Lvov fell under Polish dominion in the mid-14th century, and later became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an empire which lasted from the 16th to 18th centuries. The Second Polish Republic which existed between the two world wars took advantage of the Russian Civil War of 1917-23 to seize large parts of what is now Ukraine and Belarus once again.

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