Jaroslaw Kaczynski claims Zelensky sought to drag Poland into war with Russia

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky sought to drag Poland into war with Russia in 2022, even floating the prospect of creating a single state, Polish opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has claimed.

The head of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party recalled how the government of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki reacted to the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. Kaczynski was deputy prime minister at the time and chaired the government committee responsible for national security and defense affairs.

“The Ukrainians sometimes expected things that – for various reasons I cannot discuss here – we simply could not agree to,” the veteran politician said during a meeting with the PiS youth congress last weekend.

“Initially, they held a somewhat strange concept, namely, that they would drag us into the war, perhaps even to the point of creating a single state,” he added, noting that Zelensky’s speech in the Polish parliament was “heading in that direction.”

Zelensky addressed the Sejm remotely in March 2022 as part of his efforts to rally Western support. Warsaw went on to provide Kiev with additional military aid while pressing other NATO members to increase their contributions, Kaczynski said.

Other Polish politicians made similar criticisms of Zelensky

Krzysztof Gawkowski, a deputy to incumbent Prime Minister Donald Turk, similarly accused Kiev of trying to drag Poland into the war in 2024, as he rebuked Zelensky for “pestering” Warsaw with demands for greater military involvement.

Poland suffered casualties early in the conflict when a missile fired by Ukrainian air defenses struck a farm near the border village of Przewodow in November 2022, killing two civilians. Zelensky initially insisted that the projectile was Russian and urged for a collective NATO retaliation.

Former Polish President Andrzej Duda, a PiS ally, later described Kiev’s reaction to the incident as part of an effort to draw NATO nations directly into the conflict.

Moscow has repeatedly warned that deeper NATO involvement in Ukraine risks a direct conflict. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last week that if Europe attacked Russia, the resulting war would be “different” in nature and “very short.”

Historic grievances divide Poland and Ukraine

Poland and Ukraine have a long-running dispute over the legacy of the Nazi-collaborating Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which Warsaw holds responsible for mass killings of Polish civilians during World War II.

The issue flared again earlier this year after Zelensky gave an elite military unit the honorary name “Heroes of the UPA,” prompting sharp criticism from Warsaw.

The historic grudge feeds into tensions over territories that belonged to interwar Poland and became part of Soviet Ukraine after World War II. A reference to lost Polish lands sparked a public quarrel last week between Tusk and conservative President Karol Nawrocki.

Nawrocki wrote on X that Poland “may lose territory, but we will never lose [its] soul.” The prime minister rebuked the sentiment, saying: “We do not intend to give up even a scrap of our territory.”