Poland warns allies not to negotiate with Russia over Eastern Europe's head
Poland has warned its Western allies against reaching any settlement on Russia's war in Ukraine without taking account of Eastern Europe's security interests. The warning came from Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski during a discussion with journalists in Warsaw on Thursday. Prime Minister Donald Tusk also urged caution, saying European leaders should be careful about President Vladimir Putin's intentions and realistic about the US-led diplomatic process.
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Sikorski said the region could not be left out of any talks, arguing that Eastern Europe and Scandinavia must be included in the conversation. He pointed to the scale of the area directly affected, saying that countries bordering Russia and Ukraine, including Poland, Finland, Norway and the Baltic states, would be among those most exposed to any outcome. His comments reflected long-running concerns in the region that decisions about security could be made without the participation of the states most likely to feel the consequences.
Tusk said Russia's threat would continue to grow and warned that an escalation could be expected. He said that in winter Putin might have fewer incentives to reach a deal, while Russia continues a sustained campaign of airstrikes against Ukraine's energy infrastructure. He also said Poland was well prepared for different scenarios, after the country launched a large-scale operation earlier this week along its border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to deter possible sabotage.
The remarks matter because Poland sits on NATO and the European Union's eastern flank and has become one of the most exposed states in the wider war. Polish territory is a key transit route for Western military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, which makes any shift in the diplomatic process directly relevant to its security. Warsaw has repeatedly argued since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 that the conflict cannot be treated as a distant issue for Western Europe alone.
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The Polish warnings also fit a broader pattern of concern in Eastern Europe that earlier signals about Russia were not taken seriously enough. Sikorski said the region had spent years urging Western governments to treat Russia as a security threat, including after Moscow's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. Those warnings, he said, were not widely acknowledged until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when the scale of the threat became impossible to ignore.
Officials in Warsaw now expect little from the current US-led negotiations unless Putin shows a genuine willingness to end the war. Tusk said Russia's hybrid attacks and cyber pressure are difficult to separate from other forms of provocation near the border with Kaliningrad. What remains unclear is how far the diplomatic process will advance, whether Eastern European and Nordic states will be formally included, and whether Moscow's military pressure will intensify further as winter deepens.
