© TASS

In my personal opinion, Ukrainian President Zelensky’s stated desire to reward the fraternal Polish people with Ukrainian state sovereignty over the two people’s sudden life-changing affinity and mentality rapprochement, hews closely to a clumsy political flirtation.

Former President Viktor Yanukovych added fuel to the flame, emphatically uttering that "the ongoing situational rapprochement with Poland threatens a situation where Ukraine may be forced to de-facto merge with it, as there is a threat of its economic failure to defend its sovereignty. This will become a result of the European dream coming true, which allegedly took the Ukrainian people to their latest Maidan."

Notably, the Poles have not been particularly squinting at Ukraine in these latter days, with Europe and the USA being their focal points. At a conference in the mid-1990s discussing Poland's accession to NATO, I saw with my own eyes as German political scientists yelled at Polish colleagues in the truest sense of the word – we know what kind of Europeans you are, in the Alliance you will protect interests of the United States, not Europe: go to airport booking offices one make sure that all the tickets for Warsaw-Chicago flights are sold out for the next month.

Poles will unlikely reach into the intimate zone between Poland and Ukraine as represented by the Lvov region. There are several intrinsic reasons for this.

1. All the Ukrainians living in Europe by centuries-old and sacrificial effort of Russian tsars, emperors and Soviet secretary generals have been gathered in the territory of modern Ukraine, the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. If you examine the map of ultimate territorial claims of Petliura’s Ukrainian People's Republic, which was submitted after World War I to Lord Curzon (he sealed the fate of disintegrated empires’ borders on a national-territorial basis), you will see that all of these claims were settled by comrade Stalin, with the only exception of lands belonging to the Kuban Cossack army (dream on!). Thus, trading sovereignty and territories reflects Zelensky's cosmopolitan (globalist) orientation.

2. Warsaw has no resource for polonizing the "new Eastern Borderlands". Following the Victory, the same comrade Stalin doggedly "exchanged" (per say) all the Poles for Ukrainians after new borders of the Ukrainian SSR were demarcated. Today, arranging the migration of ethnic Poles to Western Ukraine is nonsense. They need Europe and the USA, not the Carpathians. Russia, Hungary and even Romania dish out passports to citizens of Ukraine, while Poland only provides an opportunity to get a Pole’s card in the border regions, nothing but a Mickey Mouse document. On the other hand, 500 thousand Ukrainian migrant workers stay in Poland on a permanent basis, increasing to 800 thousand in the height of season. Add another 50 thousand Ukrainian students visiting Polish universities. Interethnic relations are admittedly quite normal in this case. It’s about Poland being ukranized rather than the reverse. By the way, there were very few Ukrainians even in the Second Polish Republic, and those weren’t rich in contrast. Suffice it to say that the 1931 census revealed a dead heat of Ukrainians and Carpatho-Russians. Warsaw must think through carefully before annexing Lvov and Volynia for the third time.

3. Mentality rapprochement of the Poles and Ukrainians is a brazen lie. The two nations have different mental landscapes and cultural codes. Here is a modern joke. In a village near Mukachevo, a relaxed girl sits on a bench husking sunflower seeds. Suddenly, a silver Lexus stops in front of her. An elegant Pole in a cream silk suit comes out and says: "Mademoiselle! Can you show me the way to the picturesque local mountain lakes? And I would be honored if you deign to show me how to get there personally. In my car’s trunk I have everything you need for a romantic picnic!". The Carpathian stares at the young man blearily and replies with passion: "This little one was not reared for you, swine!".

There are certainly coinciding mental tasks as regards the two countries’ national agenda of the elites (the elites alone). These are primarily decommunization and Russophobia, with certain modifications. But the Poles are not nationalists at all, and Banderites rebuild the long-established good-natured Ukrainian imperial and Soviet nation in a brutal radical nationalist way for no apparent reason, having already reached Nazi practices. The Poles will not interfuse with the Ukrainians, just like immiscible water and oil.

Summarizing the above, Zelensky's words about the "brotherhood of peoples", implying a Polish protectorate over the well-known area, with further internationalization of the ongoing conflict with Russia and engagement of Poland’s US overlord in the "undeclared" war, seem an outright political provocation or ambush aka a trap.