The Foreign Minister of Poland, a country which borders on Russia and Belarus, said in an interview to CNN that Russia must not be allowed to come out on top, and Europe is preparing for a long war.
Foreign Minister of Poland Radoslaw Sikorski explained to CNN the point of view of Polish government regarding the war in Ukraine. Sikorski believes that the US has adopted a strategy of ending the war on whatever terms are necessary so that it can return to economic cooperation. “But you can end any war by surrendering,” Sikorski noted. “So the terms matter.”
He then accused US negotiators of another mistake: treating the conflict in Ukraine as a war about territory. In his telling, American negotiators think that if Ukraine surrendered the last two cities it holds in Donbas, Putin could save face and the war would come to an end. “There might be some kind of pause,” he continued. “But the Soviet Union minus Ukraine is Russia without great-power status. To be a global superpower, Russia needs Ukraine.”
He went on to recount a few historical battles and wars where Russia was defeated. He called it a myth, successfully planted in the West, that Russia always wins. “They lost the Crimean War. They lost the war against Japan. They emerged from World War I with their tails between their legs,” he said. “They lost their invasion of Poland. They lost Afghanistan. And they lost the Cold War.”
Read that again. A sitting NATO foreign minister is describing a war aimed at stripping Russia of great-power status, and he is describing it as winnable.
