kravietz 🦇 on Nostr: Objective assessment of the Polish-Ukrainian relations: Firstly, let’s not despair ...
Objective assessment of the Polish-Ukrainian relations:
Firstly, let’s not despair - there’s 1.2m Ukrainians living in Poland, Polish society still supports Ukraine, Polish engineers are fixing “Krab” howitzers right at the front line, Poland just sent more “Krabs” howitzers and “Rak” mortars and Polish volunteers still drive tons of help for army to Ukraine. The decline is a fact, but “interstate relations” are a complex, multi-variate continuum not a binary state.
Degradation of Polish-Ukrainian relations since their peak and absolutely unconditional support in 2022 is a fact that has been noted by many and first systematic attempt was the book by Polish journalist Zbigniew Parafianowicz. He attributes the decline to a complex set factors, which I can only summarise as lack of soft skills among the leaders.
On the immaturity of the political elites:
The first mistake is to allow societies with a clear inclination for authority-based leadership (Ukraine and Poland, yes) to actually base their relations on the personalities of their leaders. Because leaders are humans and have their cognitive biases, and once we are notice a bias in a specific person, we tend to distrust that person. That’s what happened in Poland with Duda, that what happened in Ukraine with Zelensky.
This mistake is very difficult to avoid, because it’s a positive feedback loop: people want a leader to take them through a crisis, but with time everything is loaded on the leader, and the leader becomes a hostage of the situation… so no longer leads so the trust is lost and society falls into depression (which it has itself caused) and chaotically seeks for another leader etc. You need to be an actually strong leader to be able to build an institution-based trust.
On the grain business:
Note where Zelensky says he was “defending the interests of Ukrainians, yet Ukrainians supported Poles”. Sounds like a paradox, ah? But it’s only a paradox on emotional layer. Ukrainians in Poland and Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline whom I talked to knew very well that it’s Ukrainian transport companies who are abusing EU rules and it’s precisely what caused the blockade. They complained about the stupidity of their compatriots who for a bunch of euros risked relationships with their closest ally!
Ukrainians, just like Poles, have no problem to admit their compatriots are sometimes stupid or simply frauds: when a Pole reads news about another Pole causing an accident or being caught cheating somewhere abroad, the reaction is “yeah another idiot”, not some “maybe he’s an idiot, but he’s our idiot” false patriotism. I would even say both nations tend to be slightly over-critical towards their peers, rather than too optimistic.
Now, on the immaturity of the business elites:
Zelensky could have been partially right as well. Big business has one advantage: it can deliver results. On one end of the scale you have thousands of volunteers bringing some hard-to-measure help for ZSU and an intangible concepts of “friendship” or “relations”. On the other end you’ve got the huge Ukrainian farming and transport companies who come to president and show, black on white, “here’s the billions of euros we earned you”. That’s very tangible and hard to argue with for any politician.
Of course, there’s a catch: they are only earning these billions when they can sell their goods and services cheap, and that’s where the intangible “relations” come to play. You don’t sell cheap when your trucks are blocked on the border - as a matter of fact, you don’t sell anything.
Is that “betrayal”? Morally, blockades are just as dishonest as a consumer boycott or an industrial action: when you try to impose business terms that are too exploitative, other participants of the market can simply refuse to participate on these terms. From business perspective, they’re just another way of negotiating market conditions.
We’re talking about Ukrainian farming corporations that are huge even in terms of EU market - one of them is “Kernel” (Кернель) with annual turnover of over $5 billion (!) even in 2022, year of war, controlling 15% world production of sunflower oil and 18% of cereals. And Kernel’s head Andriy Verevskiy isn’t particularly famous for being fan of fair play even inside Ukraine.
Remember “what is good for GM, is good for America”? That’s the logic I’m more than certain the big business came to Zelensky with when they had discussions on whether direct sales of grains may impact relations with Poland. “They would but we gain more, and we’re at war, Duda will understand” - was probably the working hypothesis. Except they made a wrong bet…
Firstly, let’s not despair - there’s 1.2m Ukrainians living in Poland, Polish society still supports Ukraine, Polish engineers are fixing “Krab” howitzers right at the front line, Poland just sent more “Krabs” howitzers and “Rak” mortars and Polish volunteers still drive tons of help for army to Ukraine. The decline is a fact, but “interstate relations” are a complex, multi-variate continuum not a binary state.
Degradation of Polish-Ukrainian relations since their peak and absolutely unconditional support in 2022 is a fact that has been noted by many and first systematic attempt was the book by Polish journalist Zbigniew Parafianowicz. He attributes the decline to a complex set factors, which I can only summarise as lack of soft skills among the leaders.
On the immaturity of the political elites:
The first mistake is to allow societies with a clear inclination for authority-based leadership (Ukraine and Poland, yes) to actually base their relations on the personalities of their leaders. Because leaders are humans and have their cognitive biases, and once we are notice a bias in a specific person, we tend to distrust that person. That’s what happened in Poland with Duda, that what happened in Ukraine with Zelensky.
This mistake is very difficult to avoid, because it’s a positive feedback loop: people want a leader to take them through a crisis, but with time everything is loaded on the leader, and the leader becomes a hostage of the situation… so no longer leads so the trust is lost and society falls into depression (which it has itself caused) and chaotically seeks for another leader etc. You need to be an actually strong leader to be able to build an institution-based trust.
On the grain business:
Note where Zelensky says he was “defending the interests of Ukrainians, yet Ukrainians supported Poles”. Sounds like a paradox, ah? But it’s only a paradox on emotional layer. Ukrainians in Poland and Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline whom I talked to knew very well that it’s Ukrainian transport companies who are abusing EU rules and it’s precisely what caused the blockade. They complained about the stupidity of their compatriots who for a bunch of euros risked relationships with their closest ally!
Ukrainians, just like Poles, have no problem to admit their compatriots are sometimes stupid or simply frauds: when a Pole reads news about another Pole causing an accident or being caught cheating somewhere abroad, the reaction is “yeah another idiot”, not some “maybe he’s an idiot, but he’s our idiot” false patriotism. I would even say both nations tend to be slightly over-critical towards their peers, rather than too optimistic.
Now, on the immaturity of the business elites:
Zelensky could have been partially right as well. Big business has one advantage: it can deliver results. On one end of the scale you have thousands of volunteers bringing some hard-to-measure help for ZSU and an intangible concepts of “friendship” or “relations”. On the other end you’ve got the huge Ukrainian farming and transport companies who come to president and show, black on white, “here’s the billions of euros we earned you”. That’s very tangible and hard to argue with for any politician.
Of course, there’s a catch: they are only earning these billions when they can sell their goods and services cheap, and that’s where the intangible “relations” come to play. You don’t sell cheap when your trucks are blocked on the border - as a matter of fact, you don’t sell anything.
Is that “betrayal”? Morally, blockades are just as dishonest as a consumer boycott or an industrial action: when you try to impose business terms that are too exploitative, other participants of the market can simply refuse to participate on these terms. From business perspective, they’re just another way of negotiating market conditions.
We’re talking about Ukrainian farming corporations that are huge even in terms of EU market - one of them is “Kernel” (Кернель) with annual turnover of over $5 billion (!) even in 2022, year of war, controlling 15% world production of sunflower oil and 18% of cereals. And Kernel’s head Andriy Verevskiy isn’t particularly famous for being fan of fair play even inside Ukraine.
Remember “what is good for GM, is good for America”? That’s the logic I’m more than certain the big business came to Zelensky with when they had discussions on whether direct sales of grains may impact relations with Poland. “They would but we gain more, and we’re at war, Duda will understand” - was probably the working hypothesis. Except they made a wrong bet…