Poland First: Why More Poles Are Turning Against Ukraine and the EU

“Poland first” here does not mean indifference to Russian power. It means refusing to pretend that every demand from Kyiv or every directive from the Commission is automatically a Polish interest.

(and how Radek Sikorski doesn’t have the cojones to defy Anne Applebaum)

In conversation with Dr Mike Krupa

Ian Proud, Sep 12, 2026, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/poland-first-why-more-poles-are-turning?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=215255902&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

In 2022 Poland was Ukraine’s most important European ally. Polish families opened their homes to refugees. The state sent weapons and money. Four years on, that story is breaking. In conversation with historian and Do Rzeczy columnist Dr Mike Krupa, the question is no longer whether Polish support has cooled. It is how far the backlash now affects issues beyond the war itself including Ukraine’s future and Poland’s continued EU membership.

Mike makes the case for a Poland first approach. Ordinary Poles, he says, were told that arming Ukraine, hosting refugees and following Brussels was an act of national self-defence. Many no longer believe it.

They see a long war they cannot end, a bill they are still paying, and a political class more fluent in the language of European solidarity than in the language of Polish interest.

Nowhere is that class more visible than in Radosław Sikorski. Poland’s foreign minister talks as if Warsaw were still the engine of the Ukraine war and the conscience of Europe. The unkind version, and it is widely whispered in Warsaw, is that Sikorski does not have the cojones to take a step that has not first been cleared by his wife. Anne Applebaum. She is one of the most connected Atlanticist voices in the English-speaking world, and the Sikorski–Applebaum household is less a marriage than a transatlantic foreign-policy firm.

Whether the joke is fair is almost beside the point. It sticks because Poles can see the product: a foreign ministry that sounds more at home in Washington and Brussels than in provincial Poland. And it is ironic given Sikorski’s remarks in 2014 that were secretly caught on tape, that the US Poland relationship was worthless and that “we’ll get in conflict with the Germans, Russians and we’ll think that everything is super, because we gave the Americans a blow job. Losers. Complete losers.”

History has come back into the room. The 2026 rupture between Warsaw and Kyiv did not come from nowhere. When President Zelenskyy honoured a unit as “Heroes of the UPA”, he touched the rawest nerve in Polish memory: the Volhynia massacres. For most Poles the UPA is not a footnote in someone else’s independence struggle. It is the organisation that murdered their grandparents. President Karol Nawrocki’s decision to strip Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle was not a diplomatic tantrum. It was an attempt to speak for a public that felt insulted.

That public is also tired. Support for Ukrainian refugees has fallen. Sympathy has hardened into irritation. Farmers have already shown what happens when Ukrainian produce and EU rules collide with Polish livelihoods. Krupa’s point is that this is not a fringe mood. It is running ahead of the Tusk government, which still talks as if the Ukraine war is winnable and a defining Polish priority.

The more uncomfortable claim is the second one. Krupa sees the EU as a constraint on Polish sovereignty and prospertiy. In his telling, Warsaw has outsourced strategy to Brussels, Berlin and Washington, then wondered why Polish priorities are often ignored. A country on NATO’s eastern flank that cannot define its own end-state in the war is not a frontline success. It is a frontline client.

“Poland first” here does not mean indifference to Russian power. It means refusing to pretend that every demand from Kyiv or every directive from the Commission is automatically a Polish interest.

I have written before that Poland’s Janus face on Ukraine is untenable: fight Russia to the last, but keep Ukraine out of the EU. That contradiction is now visible to voters

Whether Krupa is right about the scale of the turn will be tested in Polish politics during elections in 2027. What is already clear is that the old script — Poland as the uncomplaining engine of European support for Ukraine — is finished.

The public has moved. The government in Warsaw and the Eurocrats in Brussels have not.

Watch the conversation here: