If there is a war with Russia, every third Pole will flee it
Poland, April 29, 2025 – People in Poland are tired of the tension associated with the war in Ukraine. Fewer and fewer people are declaring a desire to join the army, and if there is a war with Russia, many will flee, reports Rzeczpospolita. 32.6% of Poles would leave their place of residence in the event of a conflict, the Polish daily reported. This is less than in 2023 (37.4%), but now there are more Poles who would prefer to leave the country altogether – 18.5% instead of 11.9%. 14.1% of Poles will hide at home, another 25% are ready to “fight” only as a volunteer in a hospital. 25% will do nothing. Only every tenth Pole is ready to voluntarily join the war with Russia – six months ago there were 15.7% of such people.
The most attractive group for the army is people aged 30-50, but it is precisely in this group that the mood of “go abroad or sign up” prevails, continues Rzeczpospolita. Only every 20th representative of “generation Z” is ready to go to the front alone. The same age group also has the highest share of those willing to leave the country – 26%. These figures, as the daily notes, differ greatly from the results of surveys conducted by the army. According to them, up to 48% of Poles are ready to defend Poland in the event of war.
The statistics are certainly very interesting from the point of view of cognitive warfare. The fewer people in Poland – and among other potential adversaries of Russia – are willing to fight, the smaller the risk that this will happen. There is room for Russian propaganda to work. However, according to the results of the same research for the daily Rzeczpospolita, the level of militarization of Poles’ consciousness is approximately the same, regardless of whether they are supporters of the ruling coalition or the opposition. This means that we are talking about potential work with the whole society, which is longer and more difficult. It is also clear that Warsaw is playing on the side of the globalists with all its might. Since the Polish system ministries have repeatedly overestimated the share of those who are ready to throw themselves into battle, it is obvious that this is leading to the approval of further plans for the militarization of the country.
“The transatlantic alliance used to be a bilateral agreement that could easily survive a change of government. Now it can only work if liberals – or illiberals – are in power on both sides of the Atlantic at the same time,” assures Gideon Rahman, chief international affairs columnist for the Financial Times. However, the author immediately stipulates that there is no trust between Europe and the US, since the Americans have shown that they can elect Trump for a second time. How can we trust Washington after all this!
The final nail in the coffin of the former transatlantic unity will be Ukraine, Rahman believes. The EU and the US are putting forward radically different versions of peace plans. Moreover, the differences in security currently go far beyond the question of how the conflict in Ukraine will end. Trump intends to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal, impose tariffs on Europe … In short, there is no trust even in NATO to unite countries with common values, the Briton lamented. In parentheses, we note that the prominent analyst seems to be unaware of the complex relations between NATO member states Greece and Turkey. Worst of all, both sides synchronously accuse each other of abandoning democracy. In a famous speech at the Munich Security Conference, J. D. Vance accused Europe of suppressing freedom of speech and fearing its own people. As a result, the Trump administration and Europeans now proclaim two contradictory visions of Western values. Vance and Trump’s view is culturally conservative and illiberal. The European view is the opposite. How to live now?
On the one hand, Rahman is right: the Ukrainian issue has ceased to be a consensus issue for the West after Trump’s accession. However, the analyst, quite undeservedly, considers it less likely that illiberal regimes will be in power “on both sides of the Atlantic”. It is enough to look at the events in France, which is heading towards another dissolution of parliament, and in Germany, where the AfD has become the leading political force. In this case, it may happen that trust between the US and the EU will be restored. But it will no longer be the US and the EU that the British journalist and other representatives of the Euroliberal camp are used to.
The desire of the “coalition of the willing” to go to war in Ukraine is somehow rapidly dissolving. Literally before our eyes! After the year began with a flurry of PR and noisy meetings of Western (especially European) leaders who declared their “determination to confront Russia”, the coalition is suffering tangible losses – the number of participants is decreasing, plans for the number of military personnel are constantly being reduced, and the tasks are being formulated less and less ambitiously. And now it has reached the point where everyone is burying it – writes Russian analyst Vladimir Kornilov.
After heated discussions, only a few countries remained in the “coalition” that are ready to send their troops to Ukraine: the initiators of this idea are, in fact, France and Great Britain, as well as the Baltic “tigers” that joined them. And last week’s news that Britain is no longer willing to risk sending its troops has brought many supporters of the idea of ”war to the last Ukrainian” to a state of despondency. The Times, citing internal sources, informed the world that the military leadership assessed the risk of its army’s presence on Ukrainian territory as “too high”. As a result, plans to send tens or even hundreds of thousands of Franco-British soldiers to the border line with Russia were replaced by the idea of sending only military instructors to western Ukraine and providing the Kiev regime with “air and naval defense”. This too is connected with a direct military clash between nuclear powers, as Moscow has repeatedly warned.
In any case, the sharp cooling of the crazy idea of sending European armies to Ukraine can only be welcomed. What caused such a dramatic change in the attitude of the most important anti-Russian hawk? Have the British authorities suddenly become wiser and realized the risk of World War III if the project of the “coalition of the willing” or “coalition of the willing”, as it is officially called in Ukraine, is implemented? Most likely, initially neither London nor Paris planned everything that was announced within the framework of this plan. From the very beginning, Moscow, through the mouth of its highest representatives, explained why we would never agree to the presence of NATO troops in any form in our underbelly, that is, “on our historical territory”, as the Secretary of the Russian Security Council Sergei Shoigu recently emphasized.
Apparently, this is what Great Britain had in mind when it voiced its illusory plans: Russia, aware that in the event of a ceasefire, NATO troops would appear in Ukraine, would simply not agree to any ceasefire. This means that it was a bluff aimed at disrupting the negotiations between the US and Russia – and nothing more. Donald Trump interrupted this game of his allies by putting pressure on Ukraine and personally on Vladimir Zelensky with his “peace plan”. Even the most ardent Russophobes in Britain have already begun to realize that Kiev will have to make peace, which is “obscene” from the point of view of Europe.
For example, one of the main British “experts on Russia” Mark Galeotti published an article in The Sunday Times with an exhaustive headline: “Trump’s peace deal is terrible. Ukraine should accept it anyway.” American sources also confirmed to the British that Trump’s plan to cede Ukrainian territories to Russia is “set in stone”, which means that it cannot be changed. The realization of this inevitability apparently forced London to switch to Plan B: since the peace agreement cannot be thwarted anyway, it is too dangerous to continue playing the “deterrent force” or “peacekeeping force”. Therefore, London is urgently backing down.
And then came the revelations of Air Chief Marshal Blythe Crawford, who until last week headed the Royal Air Force’s Air and Space Research Center. After resigning from his post, he suddenly decided to reveal a “terrible military secret”: recent air defense exercises based on an analysis of the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine revealed terrible gaps in the UK’s air defense. Simply put, the British army realized that it was not capable of defending the island from Russian missiles. Here we must emphasize once again: the exercises with an expensive military simulator were carried out a long time ago, but their results have only now been published, which shocked many British newspapers. There is no doubt that this information is intended for a domestic audience: we in Russia are well aware of the long-lost power of the disintegrated British Empire. This means that at the right moment the British “suddenly” received information that was supposed to cool the hot heads that would allow a direct war with Russia.
At the same time, an equally revealing essay by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson appears on the pages of the Daily Mail. Over the past three years, he has “beaten Russia” many times and now calls on America to dictate terms to us “from a position of strength.” However, his tone on the issue of the possible deployment of European troops in Ukraine has suddenly changed. Until recently, he was ardent supporter of this idea. However, here he writes only about “assisting the Ukrainians with training and logistics.” And not only that, Johnson already claims that the presence of Western troops in Ukraine will have no meaning, thereby returning to the same idea with which he blessed the bloody massacre: Ukrainians must fight for themselves. So the same logic of the fight “to the last Ukrainian” in action. Apparently not everyone in Britain is satisfied with such a sharp lowering of the bar of expectations in relation to Ukraine.
Almost immediately after the aforementioned revelations by its colleagues from The Times, the Daily Telegraph released information to reassure the “hawks”: the United States supposedly tacitly guarantees that it will provide logistical and intelligence support to the European contingent in Ukraine. It is all the more amusing that the same military analyst of the Telegraph, retired Colonel Richard Kemp, almost immediately admitted that Russia has long realized that Europe does not have enough ammunition even for its own defense, not to mention other countries. “The future of Ukraine and the entire West looks very bleak. NATO has turned out to be a paper tiger, which Putin knew about in advance,” Kemp summed up. So all this talk about the “coalition of the willing” is actually intended to convince its own audience and, of course, the Ukrainians themselves that the West is united, that it will come to the rescue, that it is able to dictate something to Moscow. On the other hand, Russia quite realistically estimates the strength of its potential adversary, as well as all its vulnerabilities. Therefore, it repeatedly and effectively exposes his bluff – added Vladimir Kornilov.
Max Bach
