Poland's Eastern Policy Toward Ukraine After 2022: Objectives, Instruments, and Outcomes

Introduction

The full-scale military invasion launched by the Russian Federation against Ukraine on 24 February 2022 constituted an event of transformative significance for the international order of post-Cold War Europe. The invasion did not merely represent a violation of international law and the foundational norms of the United Nations Charter; it inaugurated a period of systemic contest over the security architecture of the European continent, the credibility of collective defence commitments, and the capacity of Western states and institutions to sustain a coherent and consequential response to large-scale military aggression. Within this broader European crisis, the position occupied by the Republic of Poland was distinguished by a convergence of historical, geographic, and strategic factors that rendered Warsaw not merely one among many responding actors, but a state for which the Ukrainian question carried an urgency, an immediacy, and an existential weight that were not comparably present for more distant members of the North Atlantic Alliance. The analysis presented in this thesis is accordingly devoted to the systematic examination of Poland's Eastern policy toward Ukraine across the period from February 2022 to mid-2026: its objectives, the instruments deployed in their pursuit, and the outcomes that may be reasonably attributed to Polish policy action within the complex multilateral environment generated by the crisis.

The relevance of Poland as a subject of inquiry within the broader literature on the international response to the Russian invasion is grounded in several distinctive characteristics of Warsaw's position. Poland shares the longest land border with Ukraine of any European Union member state and received, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion's commencement, the largest share of the refugee displacement that the conflict generated — a demographic and humanitarian phenomenon without precedent in modern Polish history. Warsaw had, moreover, spent the preceding two decades advocating within both the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation for precisely the kind of robust eastern policy that the invasion suddenly rendered indispensable in the eyes of partners who had previously regarded Polish strategic warnings as excessive or premature. The strategic logic and conceptual vocabulary that Polish foreign policy had elaborated across years of relative institutional marginalisation were abruptly validated by events, investing Warsaw with a degree of political credibility and agenda-setting influence that had not previously been available to it within Euro-Atlantic forums. The study of Poland's response to the Ukrainian crisis is thus not merely a national case study in crisis management; it is an examination of how a middle power, possessed of acute historical consciousness and clear geopolitical orientation, exercises influence within multilateral structures when the strategic environment shifts in ways that align with its established preferences and assessments.

Four principal research questions organise the inquiry undertaken in this thesis. The first concerns the objectives pursued by Poland toward Ukraine following February 2022: what hierarchy of goals was established by Warsaw, how were those goals articulated in authoritative policy documents and official statements, and how did the balance among security, political, and economic objectives evolve across the period under examination. The second question concerns the instruments deployed in service of those objectives: through what diplomatic, military, humanitarian, and economic channels did Poland seek to advance its goals, and what was the relative weight and adequacy of each instrument category in relation to the stated objectives. The third question concerns outcomes: to what extent were Poland's objectives achieved, what tensions and unintended consequences were generated by the pursuit of those objectives, and how did the bilateral relationship between Warsaw and Kyiv evolve as both a vehicle for and a product of Polish policy. The fourth, and most synthetic, question concerns effectiveness: taking the full range of objectives, instruments, and outcomes together, how effective was Poland's Eastern policy during this period, and what lessons — regarding the capacities and limitations of middle power statecraft in crisis conditions — may be drawn from the Polish case for both policy practice and academic understanding? These questions are addressed in sequence across the three analytical chapters of the thesis, before being brought together in the synthesising assessment offered in the conclusion.

The theoretical and conceptual framework within which these questions are addressed is drawn from two principal traditions within the discipline of international relations. The foreign policy analysis tradition, with its emphasis on role theory and the importance of domestic political factors in shaping external behaviour, provides the interpretive lens through which Poland's self-conception as a regional power, a frontline state, and a European security provider is examined. The middle power theory tradition, which identifies the structural and behavioural characteristics of states that occupy an intermediate position within the international hierarchy, provides the comparative context within which the capacities and limitations of Warsaw's policy efforts are assessed. These two frameworks are not regarded as mutually exclusive; rather, they are treated as complementary analytical tools, each illuminating aspects of Polish Eastern policy that the other alone would leave underexamined. The application of role theory permits attention to the historically conditioned self-understanding that has shaped Polish strategic preferences, while middle power analysis permits a comparative and structural assessment of what Warsaw was realistically capable of achieving given its resource base, its institutional position, and the constraints imposed by the broader multilateral environment in which its policy was necessarily embedded.

The methodological approach adopted in this thesis is qualitative, with an emphasis on systematic documentary analysis and the application of the analytical frameworks described above to a body of primary and secondary source material assembled through structured research procedures. The primary source base encompasses Polish national security and foreign policy documents — including the National Security Strategy, governmental programmes and ministerial statements — as well as presidential speeches, parliamentary records of debate and resolution, and the texts of bilateral Polish-Ukrainian agreements and joint declarations. Multilateral primary sources include NATO summit communiqués, European Council conclusions, European Commission assessments of Ukraine's candidate status progress, and the records of relevant EU Council decisions on sanctions, accession frameworks, and financial assistance instruments. Secondary sources include peer-reviewed scholarship on Polish foreign policy and Eastern European security studies, as well as the analytical outputs of major policy research institutions whose work provides both factual documentation and interpretive context for the events under examination. The analysis is not designed to test a specific hypothesis in the formal sense; rather, it seeks to construct an empirically grounded and theoretically informed account of Polish Eastern policy that permits reasoned judgements to be advanced regarding the coherence, adequacy, and effectiveness of Warsaw's engagement with the Ukrainian crisis.

The scope of the inquiry is defined by a set of deliberate delimitations, each of which reflects a considered methodological choice. Geographically, the study is focused on the bilateral relationship between Poland and Ukraine, examined within the multilateral contexts of the European Union and the North Atlantic Alliance; it does not seek to provide a comprehensive account of either the broader Western response to the Russian invasion or of Ukrainian foreign policy as an independent subject of analysis. Temporally, the study covers the period from the commencement of the full-scale Russian invasion on 24 February 2022 to mid-2026, a boundary that permits the assessment of both immediate responses and medium-term trajectories while acknowledging the fundamental uncertainty that attaches to events still unfolding at the time of writing. The choice of this temporal boundary reflects the judgement that by mid-2026 sufficient time has elapsed for meaningful patterns to be identified and assessed, while remaining conscious of the limitations that attend any study of a crisis whose resolution lies, at the time of analysis, in the indeterminate future. These delimitations are not treated as absolute; where understanding Poland's conduct after 2022 requires reference to earlier developments — including the historical determinants of Polish Eastern policy, the intellectual legacy of the Promethean and Jagiellonian traditions, or the post-communist trajectory of Polish strategic thought — such reference is provided as contextual background within the first analytical chapter.

The thesis is structured across three analytical chapters, preceded by this introduction and followed by a conclusion that synthesises the principal findings. The first chapter establishes the theoretical and conceptual foundations upon which the subsequent empirical analysis rests. It traces the historical determinants of Polish Eastern policy, with particular attention to the formative influence of the Promethean and Jagiellonian traditions on Polish strategic thought, and to the post-communist consolidation of a distinct Eastern policy orientation that finds its most developed institutional expression in the Eastern Partnership initiative and the sustained advocacy for Ukrainian Euro-Atlantic integration that Warsaw pursued across the decades preceding the 2022 invasion. The chapter also elaborates the analytical framework — drawing on foreign policy role theory, middle power theory, and the conceptual taxonomy of policy instruments — that is operationalised across the empirical chapters that follow.

The second chapter constitutes the principal empirical contribution of the study. It analyses, across five thematic domains, the objectives pursued by Poland toward Ukraine in the period 2022 to 2026 and the instruments deployed in their service. The five domains examined are: the articulation of policy objectives in official documents and authoritative statements; the diplomatic instruments through which Warsaw sought to shape multilateral responses, coordinate Alliance behaviour, and advance Ukraine's candidacy for EU membership; the military assistance provided to Ukraine's armed forces, including both material contributions and the training and intelligence support dimensions of Polish engagement; the humanitarian response to the displacement crisis generated by the invasion; and the economic instruments deployed by Warsaw, including sanctions advocacy, trade policy adjustment, and engagement with international reconstruction frameworks. Together, these five domains encompass the full range of Warsaw's Eastern policy engagement and permit the systematic assessment of the coherence between stated objectives and the instruments deployed in their pursuit.

The third chapter turns from the documentation of instruments to the assessment of outcomes. It examines, through five analytical lenses, the degree to which Poland's Eastern policy objectives were achieved across the period under review: the security outcomes achieved on NATO's eastern flank through deterrence reinforcement and Alliance cohesion; the political outcomes regarding Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic integration trajectory; the evolution of the bilateral Warsaw-Kyiv relationship, including both the solidarity demonstrated in the face of existential crisis and the tensions generated by agricultural trade disputes, historical memory controversies, and the competing domestic political pressures experienced by both governments; the domestic political constraints that shaped and at times limited the coherence and sustainability of Poland's Eastern policy; and a synthesising evaluation of overall policy effectiveness, drawing upon the conceptual framework established in the first chapter and the empirical record documented in the second. The conclusion brings together the findings of all three chapters, advances the principal analytical conclusions regarding Poland's performance as an Eastern policy actor during this period, and identifies the implications of those conclusions for the future trajectory of Polish-Ukrainian relations and for the broader understanding of middle power statecraft in crisis conditions. It is to the historical and theoretical foundations of the inquiry that the analysis now turns.

Chapter 1: Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations of Poland's Eastern Policy

1.1. Historical Determinants of Polish Eastern Policy

The intellectual and strategic foundations of Poland's eastern policy are rooted in a historical experience that extends across several centuries, shaped by the contested geopolitical space of Central and Eastern Europe and by the recurring vulnerability of the Polish state to pressures emanating from both East and West. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which at its zenith in the seventeenth century encompassed the territories of present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and significant portions of present-day Russia, established a multi-ethnic political tradition that invested Polish political culture with a distinctive awareness of the eastern neighbourhood ^[4]. The successive partitions of Poland between 1772 and 1795, carried out by the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Habsburg Monarchy, instilled a deep and enduring sense of geopolitical vulnerability that has persisted as a structural feature of Polish strategic consciousness ^[6]. This experience of extinction and recovery — the Polish state disappearing from the map of Europe for one hundred and twenty-three years before its restoration in 1918 — generated a political culture in which questions of sovereignty, independence, and the disposition of neighbouring states assumed an existential rather than merely instrumental character. The territories of present-day Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, known in Polish political tradition as the Kresy, thus occupied a place in Polish historical imagination that was simultaneously cultural, strategic, and profoundly contested, bearing within them the unresolved residues of imperial legacy, ethnic complexity, and traumatic shared memory.

The intellectual legacy most directly formative of Poland's post-Cold War eastern policy was elaborated not within the structures of the Polish state but in the pages of the émigré journal Kultura, founded by Jerzy Giedroyc in Rome in 1946 and subsequently published for more than five decades from Maisons-Laffitte near Paris ^[1]. Giedroyc, who described himself as "a man of the east" and brought to his editorial work a distinctive sensitivity rooted in his Minsk birth and Moscow childhood, occupied a position unique within the Polish émigré milieu: unlike the government-in-exile based in London, which continued to demand the restoration of Poland's pre-war eastern borders, Giedroyc and his collaborators insisted that the future of Eastern Europe must be created from within the region, and not in emigration or from the West ^[1]. As early as 1947, Giedroyc had begun to consider the possibility of Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation, advancing the proposition — radical within émigré circles — that independent states of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus were not competitors for Polish territory but preconditions for Polish security and sovereignty ^[3]. This perspective, elaborated over decades of editorial and political engagement, crystallised in the so-called ULB doctrine, developed principally by Giedroyc and his chief political commentator Juliusz Mieroszewski in the mid-1970s, which held that Poland's independence could only be secured within the framework of genuinely independent Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus, and that any Polish ambition to dominate or reclaim the eastern borderlands was not only historically untenable but strategically self-defeating ^[3].

The doctrine articulated by Giedroyc and Mieroszewski possessed several intellectually distinctive features that distinguished it from both the Polish nationalist tradition and from prevailing Western approaches to the Soviet bloc. First, it demanded an unambiguous Polish renunciation of all territorial claims to Lviv and Vilnius — cities of immense symbolic importance to the Polish historical consciousness — on the grounds that only such a renunciation could provide the foundation for genuine partnership with Ukrainian and Lithuanian political forces ^[3]. Second, it framed the independence of the ULB states not as an instrumental concession but as a categorical political and moral imperative: a 1977 declaration published in Kultura and signed jointly by Polish intellectuals including Giedroyc, Józef Czapski, and Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, alongside Russian dissidents including Andrei Amalrik and Vladimir Bukovsky, proclaimed solidarity with Ukrainians fighting for their country's independence and demanded the end of Soviet colonialism ^[3]. Third, and perhaps most significantly for the subsequent trajectory of Polish foreign policy, the Giedroyc doctrine linked Poland's own security and European integration inextricably to the sovereign destiny of its eastern neighbours, thereby providing a normative and strategic rationale for active Polish engagement with the post-Soviet space that transcended narrow national interest. The publication of the anthology of Ukrainian Soviet writers, the Executed Renaissance, in Kultura at the end of the 1950s had already demonstrated the journal's commitment to Ukrainian cultural and political recognition at a time when such recognition was exceptional within European political discourse ^[3].

The operationalisation of the Giedroyc doctrine within the foreign policy of the democratic Polish state proceeded rapidly following the transition of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Poland became the first country in the world to recognise Ukrainian independence, acting in direct conformity with the ULB framework and thereby establishing a precedent that reflected years of ideological preparation within the Kultura circle ^[3]. Successive Polish presidents — Aleksander Kwaśniewski, Lech Kaczyński, and Bronisław Komorowski — invoked the ULB concept as a guiding principle of Polish eastern policy, and the doctrine became embedded in the institutional culture of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the intellectual frameworks deployed by Polish diplomats and analysts ^[3]. A particular test of this doctrine's practical application arose during the Orange Revolution of 2004, when President Kwaśniewski undertook active diplomatic mediation between the contending Ukrainian political forces and assumed a prominent role in the international community's response to the disputed Ukrainian presidential election, thereby demonstrating that Poland's commitment to Ukrainian democratic development was not merely rhetorical but operationally significant ^[1]. The historical memory disputes that periodically disturbed Polish-Ukrainian relations — most notably the question of the Volhynia massacres of 1943, in which the Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed tens of thousands of Polish civilians under Nazi occupation — represented a persistent tension within the Giedroyc framework, which had always acknowledged the painful legacies of shared history while insisting that these could not be permitted to obstruct the construction of a partnership founded on mutual interest and strategic complementarity ^[2].

The relationship between historical determinants and contemporary policy formation became particularly salient in the period following Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its support for separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, and reached its culmination in the Polish response to the full-scale invasion of February 2022. The argument developed in the following chapters is that Warsaw's immediate, sustained, and exceptionally robust support for Ukraine after 2022 was not a reactive improvisation but the product of decades of ideological preparation, strategic consensus-building, and institutional learning rooted in the Giedroyc framework. As Ola Hnatiuk has observed, without the Giedroyc legacy "Polish-Ukrainian relations would have been in an entirely different state after the breakup of the Soviet Union," and this observation points toward the intellectual genealogy that rendered Poland uniquely prepared for the role of Ukraine's principal advocate within the Euro-Atlantic community ^[1]. The recognition that Ukrainian independence was not an accident of Soviet disintegration but the expression of a long-suppressed national aspiration — a recognition advanced in Kultura's pages decades before it became fashionable in Western capitals — provided Polish policymakers with an analytical framework that proved strikingly more accurate than the assessments prevailing in Berlin, Paris, or Washington ^[1]. The historical inheritance constituted by the Giedroyc doctrine, the institutional memory of the first recognition of Ukrainian independence, and the sustained bilateral engagement of the post-1991 decades collectively endowed Polish eastern policy with a strategic consistency and normative confidence that distinguished Warsaw's response to 2022 and that can only be understood against this deep historical background.

1.2. Theoretical Frameworks: Realism, Constructivism, and the Regional Power Concept

The analysis of Polish foreign policy toward Ukraine after 2022 requires engagement with the principal theoretical frameworks of the discipline of international relations, each of which illuminates different dimensions of Warsaw's behaviour and none of which is, individually, sufficient to account for the full complexity of Polish policy. The Foreign Policy Analysis field, as it has developed since the Cold War, has sought to integrate insights from structural theories of international relations with attention to the psychological, organisational, and ideational factors that shape the behaviour of specific states and their decision-makers [5, p. 237]. In the Polish case, three theoretical traditions are of particular relevance: neorealism and classical realism, which explain Polish behaviour as a response to structural incentives rooted in the anarchic international system and the distribution of material capabilities; constructivism, which highlights the formative role of identity, historical memory, and normative commitments; and the concept of the regional middle power, which offers a framework for understanding how states of intermediate capability seek to exercise disproportionate influence within multilateral structures. Each of these traditions generates distinct hypotheses regarding the objectives Poland would be expected to pursue, the instruments it would be expected to deploy, and the conditions under which its policy might succeed or fail, and each contributes to a more complete explanatory account than any single framework could provide on its own.

Neorealist and classical realist approaches, drawing on the foundational contributions of Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer, and Hans Morgenthau, offer the most structurally parsimonious account of Polish eastern policy. From a neorealist perspective, Poland's sustained support for Ukrainian sovereignty and Euro-Atlantic integration is explicable as a forward-defence strategy: by seeking to prevent the re-establishment of Russian dominance over the post-Soviet western borderlands, Poland works to maintain a strategic buffer between itself and a revisionist great power operating within the logic of offensive territorial expansion ^[7]. Offensive realism would predict precisely the behaviour observed in Warsaw after 2022 — maximal material support for Ukraine combined with aggressive advocacy within NATO and the EU for more robust deterrence commitments — as the rational response of a state located in close proximity to a great power whose revisionist ambitions have been demonstrably revealed through its attack on a neighbouring sovereign state ^[7]. The realist framework also explains Poland's consistent prioritisation of the United States as the ultimate guarantor of Polish security over European alternatives, a preference rooted in the material asymmetry between American and European defence capabilities that renders the transatlantic guarantee indispensable from a balance-of-power perspective ^[6]. Realism's principal limitation in this context is its relative insensitivity to the specifically ideational content of Polish policy: the Giedroyc doctrine's emphasis on normative solidarity, democratic promotion, and the moral obligations of historical partnership exceeds what a purely structural account would predict, pointing toward the explanatory relevance of ideational factors that structural theories tend to underweight in their analyses of state behaviour.

Constructivist approaches, drawing on the foundational contributions of Alexander Wendt, Peter Katzenstein, and their applications within Central and Eastern European foreign policy analysis, provide an essential complement to structural accounts by highlighting the role of identity, collective memory, and normative commitments as independent causal variables in the formation of foreign policy. Constructivism holds that the categories through which states define their interests and perceive their environment — anarchy, threat, partnership, obligation — are not given by the objective structure of the international system but are socially constructed through processes of meaning-making involving political elites, public culture, and historical narrative [5, p. 241]. In the Polish case, this insight is of particular importance: the sense of historical affinity and normative solidarity with Ukraine that has characterised Polish policy cannot be reduced to a calculation of material interest, however broadly construed, but reflects a specific construction of national identity and historical memory rooted in the shared experience of Soviet domination, the ideological legacy of the Kultura circle, and the political culture produced by the Solidarity movement. The constructivist emphasis on the formative role of ideas in shaping policy rationales is supported by the observation that the Giedroyc doctrine predated and arguably shaped the material incentives that subsequently aligned with its prescriptions: Polish policymakers embraced the ULB framework as a moral and political commitment before it became a strategic convenience ^[1]. The theory's limitation in this context is its relative difficulty in explaining the discipline and resource mobilisation evident in Polish policy after 2022, which suggests a degree of strategic calculation that goes beyond the mere expression of identity commitments and requires engagement with the material and institutional dimensions that realism highlights.

The concept of the regional middle power, as developed in the scholarly literature on foreign policy and applied to the Central European context, offers a third and complementary theoretical perspective that is particularly well-suited to capturing the specific character of Poland's role after 2022. Middle powers are conventionally defined as states that lack the material capabilities of great powers but occupy a sufficiently prominent position within the international hierarchy to exercise significant influence, particularly within multilateral frameworks and on issues of regional concern. The characteristic foreign policy profile of middle powers includes a preference for niche diplomacy — the concentration of scarce resources on specific issue areas where the state can exercise leadership — coalition-building with like-minded actors, active engagement with international institutions, and the deployment of normative legitimacy as a substitute for material preponderance. All of these characteristics are observable in Polish eastern policy after 2022: Warsaw concentrated its diplomatic effort on shaping the European and NATO responses to Russian aggression, built and led coalitions within the Bucharest Nine format, championed Ukraine's EU candidate status against the hesitancy of larger member states, and consistently appealed to the values of democratic solidarity and collective defence as the basis for its advocacy ^[6]. The regional middle power framework is also sensitive to the specific constraints that such states face — limited capacity to act unilaterally, dependence on the support of great-power allies, and vulnerability to being marginalised within institutions dominated by larger actors — and these constraints are, as the following chapters will demonstrate, evident in the record of Polish policy between 2022 and 2026.

The theoretical position adopted in this thesis is a synthetic one that treats structural incentives, ideational commitments, and middle-power agency as complementary rather than competing explanatory variables. As Pawłuszko has observed in his analysis of Polish foreign policy rationales, international relations theories are most useful not as mutually exclusive paradigms but as lenses that illuminate different aspects of the same policy reality, and the concept of "political rationale" — the socially constructed theoretical justification for political choices — provides a useful bridge between the abstract propositions of IR theory and the observable practice of foreign policy [5, p. 238]. Polish foreign policy in the post-2022 period may be understood as driven simultaneously by structural imperatives that any realist analysis would predict, by ideational commitments that constructivism identifies as causal, and by the strategic repertoire characteristic of a middle power seeking to amplify its influence through institutional channels and coalition-building. In the Polish case, the neorealist account explains why the structural incentives for robust support of Ukrainian sovereignty are overwhelming; the constructivist account explains why those incentives were acted upon with the particular intensity, consistency, and normative framing that characterised Polish policy; and the middle-power framework explains the specific diplomatic strategies and institutional channels through which Warsaw sought to translate its commitments into tangible outcomes. This synthetic framework will be operationalised in the analytical chapters that follow, providing the conceptual vocabulary for the systematic assessment of Polish objectives, instruments, and outcomes in relation to the Ukrainian crisis.

1.3. Poland's Strategic Culture and the Eastern Dimension of EU and NATO Policy

Strategic culture, understood as the historically embedded set of beliefs, assumptions, and predispositions regarding the use of force, the nature of external threat, and the appropriate means of securing national interests, constitutes a crucial mediating variable between historical experience and concrete foreign policy output. Drawing on the foundational contributions of Jack Snyder, Colin Gray, and the subsequent literature on European strategic cultures, the concept provides a framework for explaining why states in structurally similar positions may respond differently to comparable international stimuli, and why Poland's response to the 2022 invasion diverged so markedly from that of several other European states despite shared membership in the Euro-Atlantic community. Poland's strategic culture has been shaped by the distinctive combination of factors identified in the preceding section: repeated historical experience of occupation and partition; the ideological legacy of the Kultura circle; the political culture of the Solidarity movement and the democratic transition; and the structural realities of Poland's geopolitical position between a reunified Germany and a revisionist Russia ^[6]. These factors have produced a strategic culture characterised by several consistent features that distinguish it from the strategic cultures of Western European states and that have had measurable consequences for the formulation and implementation of Polish foreign and security policy across successive governments.

The principal characteristics of Poland's strategic culture, as elaborated in the scholarly literature and reflected in official policy documents, may be identified as follows:

• A heightened and persistent perception of the Russian threat, rooted in historical experience and reinforced by the observed trajectory of Russian policy since 1991, which leads Polish decision-makers to assess Russian intentions more pessimistically than many Western European counterparts and to maintain a structural scepticism regarding the durability of cooperative arrangements with Moscow ^[6].
• A strong preference for binding institutional commitments — particularly within NATO and, secondarily, the EU — over bilateral or unilateral arrangements, rooted in the historical lesson that Polish security cannot rest on self-reliance alone and that only embedded multilateral guarantees provide adequate protection against great-power revisionism.
• A consequent emphasis on the indispensability of the United States as the ultimate guarantor of Polish security, manifesting in consistent Polish advocacy for a strong transatlantic link, significant American force presence on Polish territory, and critical evaluation of initiatives for European strategic autonomy that might weaken the American commitment ^[7].
• A normative disposition toward the democratic solidarity of the Euro-Atlantic community that functions both as a genuine value commitment and as a legitimising frame for interest-based policy, enabling Poland to present its advocacy for Ukrainian sovereignty as an expression of universal principles rather than of exclusively national interest.
• A forward-defence strategic logic that leads Poland to seek the stabilisation and democratic development of its eastern neighbourhood as a first line of security, and to regard the independence and Euro-Atlantic trajectory of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania as a strategic interest of the first order ^[3].

Poland's strategic culture found its most significant multilateral institutional expression in the country's role as a primary architect and champion of the European Union's Eastern Partnership framework, established in 2009 on the joint initiative of Poland and Sweden. The Eastern Partnership represented the operationalisation, within EU institutional structures, of the Giedroyc doctrine's prescriptions for engagement with the post-Soviet eastern neighbourhood: by offering Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan a structured relationship with the EU encompassing trade liberalisation, regulatory approximation, and political dialogue, Poland sought to extend the zone of European democratic governance eastward in a manner that reflected both normative commitment and strategic calculation ^[1]. The framework's trajectory through the Vilnius Summit failure of November 2013 — when the Ukrainian government withdrew from the anticipated Association Agreement under Russian pressure — and the subsequent Euromaidan revolution, Russian annexation of Crimea, and war in Donbas revealed both the ambitions and the limitations of the Eastern Partnership as an instrument of Polish strategic culture: it had successfully articulated the aspirations of Ukrainian civil society and political reformers, but it had underestimated the degree to which Russia would respond to EU's eastern neighbourhood engagement as a direct security threat requiring coercive countermeasures. The trajectory of the Eastern Partnership also revealed the limits of Polish influence within EU institutional structures: Warsaw could initiate and champion frameworks, but it could not prevent other member states and the Commission from interpreting and applying those frameworks in ways that diluted their strategic content or slowed their implementation.

Within NATO, Poland's strategic culture generated an equally consistent pattern of advocacy for enhanced forward presence, higher defence spending commitments, and a more robust deterrence posture on the alliance's eastern flank. Poland's persistent argument — advanced consistently across successive governments of different political orientations — was that the conventional deterrence posture inherited from the Cold War was inadequate for the post-2014 security environment, and that the stationing of substantial Allied forces on Polish territory was required to provide credible deterrence against Russian military pressure ^[6]. This advocacy yielded tangible institutional results: the Warsaw NATO Summit of 2016 established the Enhanced Forward Presence, including the deployment of a multinational battlegroup to Poland; subsequent summits in Madrid and Vilnius further strengthened the alliance's eastern flank commitments, moving toward a more substantial forward defence posture. Poland's achievement of defence spending at 4.7 per cent of GDP by 2025 — among the highest proportions of any NATO ally — represented the material embodiment of this strategic-cultural predisposition, and its plans to build the largest land army in Europe reflected a strategic logic that consistently prioritised hard-security investment over other policy alternatives ^[6]. These commitments were maintained across the political transition of 2023, in which the Law and Justice government was replaced by a coalition led by Donald Tusk, demonstrating that the underlying strategic-cultural consensus on eastern policy transcended partisan divisions and constituted a durable feature of the Polish foreign policy establishment.

The tensions between Poland's strategic culture and the more cautious postures of key EU partners — notably Germany and France — have been a persistent feature of the intra-EU debate on eastern policy, and these tensions acquired particular salience in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion. German strategic culture, shaped by a different historical experience and a distinctive reading of the lessons of the Second World War, had long prioritised dialogue, economic interdependence, and the avoidance of confrontational postures vis-à-vis Russia, producing the Ostpolitik tradition and the construction of deep energy interdependence through the Nord Stream pipeline system. French strategic culture, shaped by Gaullist traditions of national autonomy and a preference for European strategic independence, had tended to support dialogue with Moscow and to resist what Paris perceived as excessive dependence on American security guarantees, producing perspectives on European Strategic Autonomy that diverged significantly from Poland's institutionalist and transatlanticist preferences ^[7]. These divergences were not merely rhetorical disagreements but reflected genuinely different historical memories, geopolitical situations, and assessments of Russian intentions that had accumulated over decades of post-Cold War engagement with Moscow. The 2022 invasion subjected these divergences to a severe test, validating Poland's longstanding strategic-cultural assessments and compelling a significant, if uneven and incomplete, convergence of European strategic cultures toward the Polish position: German defence spending increased substantially, French officials moderated their advocacy for engagement with Russia, and NATO allies who had previously resisted forward defence postures moved toward acceptance of permanent Allied presence on the eastern flank. The degree to which this convergence was durable, and the extent to which it translated into sustained institutional commitments within the EU and NATO rather than merely conjunctural adjustments, constitutes one of the central empirical questions examined in the chapters that follow.

1.4. Conceptualising Policy Effectiveness: Objectives, Instruments, and Outcomes

The assessment of the effectiveness of Polish eastern policy toward Ukraine between 2022 and 2026 requires the establishment of a rigorous analytical framework that specifies the conceptual categories through which policy objectives are identified, instruments are classified, and outcomes are evaluated. The broader field of Foreign Policy Analysis, as it has developed since the pioneering contributions of James Rosenau and the subsequent methodological refinements offered by Walter Carlsnaes, Christopher Hill, and others, provides both the conceptual vocabulary and the methodological orientation appropriate to this task [5, p. 237]. The present subchapter does not seek to review this literature exhaustively but rather to appropriate its most relevant contributions for the specific purpose of assessing Polish policy, acknowledging the methodological challenges inherent in effectiveness analysis while specifying a transparent and systematic approach capable of yielding empirically grounded conclusions. The conceptual framework employed in this thesis treats foreign policy effectiveness as a function of the relationship between stated and inferable objectives, the instruments deployed in their pursuit, and the observable outcomes that can be plausibly attributed to policy action, recognising that in a complex multilateral environment attribution is rarely straightforward and counterfactual analysis is necessarily uncertain and contestable.

The first conceptual category — policy objectives — is defined as the goals that Polish decision-makers sought to achieve through their engagement with the Ukraine crisis, as reconstructed from official governmental documents, presidential and ministerial speeches, parliamentary resolutions, and strategic communications. Three methodological considerations govern the reconstruction of Polish policy objectives. First, the distinction between stated and operative objectives is maintained: official rhetoric does not always perfectly reflect the hierarchy of priorities that guides actual policy choice, and the analysis therefore draws on a range of sources that can triangulate between public positions and operational decisions. Second, objectives are classified along two axes: a temporal axis distinguishing immediate crisis-response objectives — such as preventing Ukrainian military collapse, securing emergency arms deliveries, and coordinating the Allied response in the first weeks of the invasion — from medium-term structural objectives, including the consolidation of NATO's eastern flank, Ukraine's EU candidate status, and the construction of a post-war European security architecture; and a substantive axis distinguishing security objectives, political objectives, and socioeconomic objectives. Third, the analysis acknowledges that policy objectives are not always internally consistent, and that tensions between objectives — for example, between maximising support for Ukraine and managing the economic and social costs of the conflict for Polish society — are themselves important data for the assessment of strategic effectiveness and the identification of structural constraints on Polish policy.

The second conceptual category — instruments — is defined in accordance with the standard taxonomy of foreign policy tools and disaggregated to reflect the specific means deployed by Poland in its engagement with the Ukraine crisis. The classification adopted in this thesis distinguishes four primary categories of instrument:

• Diplomatic instruments, encompassing bilateral diplomatic channels between Warsaw and Kyiv, Poland's role as a norm entrepreneur within EU institutions pressing for sanctions adoption, accession commitments, and financial support packages, and its efforts to strengthen NATO's eastern flank through coalition-building formats including the Bucharest Nine and direct lobbying of Allied capitals.
• Military instruments, encompassing arms transfers and military assistance programmes, the provision of training to Ukrainian armed forces personnel on Polish territory, logistical support for the transit of military equipment from other Allied states, and advocacy for the transfer of specific weapons systems — including aircraft and advanced artillery — that other allies had initially hesitated to provide.
• Humanitarian instruments, encompassing Poland's management of the largest refugee influx in contemporary European history, the operation of reception and integration infrastructure, the extension of social services and educational access to Ukrainian displaced persons, and the channelling of bilateral and EU humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian territory.
• Economic instruments, encompassing the implementation of EU sanctions regimes against Russia and the monitoring of their enforcement, the absorption of economic costs arising from the disruption of eastern trade, transit facilitation for Ukrainian agricultural and industrial exports, and the positioning of Polish enterprises and the Polish state in international discussions regarding Ukrainian reconstruction financing and long-term economic recovery.

The third conceptual category — outcomes — is defined as the observable changes in the political, security, and institutional environment that can be plausibly linked to Polish policy action, assessed against the objectives specified above. The assessment of outcomes confronts the attribution problem with particular acuity in the Polish case: Polish policy was conducted within and through multilateral frameworks — the EU, NATO, the Group of Seven, and various bilateral formats — in which outcomes were produced by the collective action of many actors, making it methodologically problematic to isolate the marginal contribution of any single state. This challenge is addressed through the concept of attributed influence, which assesses Poland's contribution to observed outcomes by examining the degree to which Polish initiatives preceded, shaped, or accelerated decisions taken within multilateral formats, and by tracing the mechanism through which Polish advocacy translated into institutional outcomes. Process-tracing — the systematic examination of the sequence of events, decisions, and communications through which policy outputs were produced — is employed as the primary analytical method for establishing causal links between Polish policy actions and observed outcomes, and is recognised in the Foreign Policy Analysis literature as particularly appropriate for the study of small and middle power influence within multilateral settings [5, p. 238]. The analysis acknowledges the inherent limitations of this methodology, including the difficulty of accessing private diplomatic communications and the possibility that Polish influence was exercised through informal channels that leave limited documentary trace.

The evidence base for the empirical chapters draws on three categories of source, each of which contributes a distinct type of information to the overall analysis. Primary sources include official Polish government documents — National Security Strategies, White Papers on National Security, governmental programmes and ministerial statements — as well as presidential speeches, parliamentary records of debate and resolution, and the texts of bilateral Polish-Ukrainian agreements and joint declarations. Multilateral primary sources include NATO summit communiqués, European Council conclusions, European Commission assessments of Ukraine's candidate status progress, and the records of relevant EU Council decisions on sanctions, accession frameworks, and financial assistance instruments. Secondary sources include peer-reviewed scholarship on Polish foreign policy and Eastern European security studies, as well as the outputs of major policy research institutions — including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Fondation pour l'Innovation Politique, and the Polish Institute of International Affairs — whose analyses provide both factual documentation and interpretive context for the events examined ^[2], ^[6]. The conceptual framework established in this chapter will be operationalised across the empirical chapters that follow: Chapter 2 employs the instruments taxonomy to document and analyse the full range of Polish policy tools deployed in support of Ukraine, while Chapter 3 applies the outcomes framework to assess the degree of objective attainment, the nature and significance of unintended consequences, and the overall strategic effectiveness of Warsaw's engagement with the Ukrainian crisis over the period under review.

Chapter 2: Polish Foreign Policy Objectives and Instruments Toward Ukraine, 2022–2026

The Russian Federation's full-scale military assault on Ukraine, launched on 24 February 2022, compelled the Polish state to mobilise its foreign policy apparatus with a comprehensiveness and urgency unprecedented in the post-Cold War period. Warsaw's response was neither improvised nor reactive in its deeper logic; it reflected the activation of role conceptions and strategic preferences that had been cultivated across decades of post-communist reorientation. The present chapter analyses the objectives pursued by Poland toward Ukraine across the period 2022 to 2026, the instruments deployed in service of those objectives, and the principal outcomes that may be attributed, at least in part, to Polish policy choices. The analysis is structured across five thematic domains: the articulation of policy objectives, diplomatic instruments, military assistance, humanitarian response, and economic instruments. Together, these domains encompass the full range of Warsaw's engagement and permit a systematic assessment of the coherence, adequacy, and effectiveness of Polish Eastern policy during the most consequential security crisis of the post-Cold War era.

2.1. Articulation of Policy Objectives: Security, Sovereignty, and the European Integration of Ukraine

The hierarchy of objectives pursued by Warsaw toward Ukraine following February 2022 may be reconstructed through systematic analysis of official primary sources: addresses delivered by President Andrzej Duda, statements issued by successive Prime Ministers Mateusz Morawiecki and Donald Tusk, resolutions adopted by the Sejm and Senate, and programmatic communications from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Across these sources, three overarching objectives are consistently foregrounded, constituting the normative and strategic framework within which specific policy instruments were subsequently deployed. These objectives are not merely declaratory; they reflect deeply embedded role conceptions that had guided Polish foreign policy for at least three decades and that were reactivated and intensified by the external shock of the Russian invasion ^[8].

The security objective occupied the apex of Warsaw's declared hierarchy. Polish official discourse consistently framed Ukrainian territorial integrity as an indispensable precondition for Polish national security, invoking the so-called domino thesis — the argument that Russian military success in Ukraine would inevitably shift the threat vector westward, placing NATO's eastern flank and, ultimately, Polish territory within the calculus of Russian expansionism. This framing was not merely rhetorical: it provided the strategic rationale for resource commitments of an extraordinary scale and for Warsaw's insistence that any negotiated settlement premised on territorial concession would constitute a reward for aggression incompatible with the principles of European security. The concept of strategic depth, invoked with notable frequency in Polish governmental communications, expressed the argument that a sovereign, militarily capable, and westward-oriented Ukraine functions as a buffer zone of existential significance for Polish security, making the defence of Ukrainian sovereignty simultaneously an act of self-defence ^[8]. These role conceptions, analysts employing role theory in foreign policy analysis have noted, tend to remain stable across domestic political transitions precisely because they are grounded in collective memory, historical experience, and strategic culture ^[8].

The sovereignty objective was articulated with particular insistence in the Polish governmental position, distinguishing Warsaw's stance from the more ambiguous postures adopted by several larger Western powers in the early months of the conflict. Polish official statements explicitly and repeatedly rejected any framework of conflict resolution that would require Kyiv to accept permanent loss of internationally recognised Ukrainian territory, including Crimea and the Donbas regions occupied since 2014. This maximalist-sovereignty position achieved a degree of domestic political consensus that was in itself a notable feature of Polish foreign policy during the crisis: the governing Law and Justice coalition and the principal opposition formations converged on the inadmissibility of territorial concessions, temporarily suppressing the polarised domestic political environment that had characterised the preceding years ^[8]. It has been observed in the scholarly literature that external threats of sufficient severity can silence internal, highly politicised debates and, to some extent, suspend domestic political conflict, thereby enabling a return to the main traditional features of foreign policy ^[8]. The Polish case in 2022 provides strong empirical support for this proposition.

The European integration objective constituted the third pillar of Warsaw's declared policy hierarchy. Poland had positioned itself as a consistent and vocal advocate for Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic integration long before 2022, supporting initiatives such as the Eastern Partnership within the European Neighbourhood Policy. The Russian invasion imparted fresh urgency and institutional traction to this advocacy. Warsaw argued, both within EU institutional forums and in bilateral diplomatic exchanges, that Ukraine's EU candidacy should be granted with exceptional dispatch as a geopolitical signal of Western solidarity and as a structural instrument for anchoring Ukraine within the European order during and after the conflict. This normative commitment was, however, not without tension: as shall be examined in subsequent sections of this chapter, accelerated accession timelines generated friction with Polish agricultural interests and with the broader political economy of EU enlargement, revealing the limits of an unconditional solidarity posture when it intersected with tangible distributional consequences for domestic constituencies ^[11].

2.2. Diplomatic Instruments: Bilateral Relations, EU Advocacy, and NATO Engagement

Three principal diplomatic channels were employed by Warsaw in pursuit of the objectives identified above: bilateral state-to-state diplomacy with Kyiv, norm entrepreneurship within European Union institutions, and alliance management within NATO with particular reference to the Bucharest Nine format. Each of these channels exhibited distinct logics, operated through different institutional architectures, and achieved different degrees of success when assessed against the stated objectives. Their combined deployment reflected a strategic understanding, long embedded in Polish foreign policy culture, that middle powers in the European context must operate simultaneously across multiple institutional arenas in order to exercise influence disproportionate to their material capabilities.

Bilateral diplomacy between Warsaw and Kyiv was distinguished, in the post-February 2022 period, by the frequency and symbolic weight of high-level contacts. Presidential visits to Kyiv — including President Duda's early wartime appearances alongside other Visegrád leaders in the first weeks of the conflict — served simultaneously as gestures of solidarity, demonstrations of personal commitment, and opportunities for direct coordination on military and political matters. The Polish embassy in Kyiv remained operational throughout active hostilities, a decision that carried considerable symbolic freight given that most large EU member states had temporarily withdrawn their diplomatic missions. This continuity of diplomatic presence was publicly noted by Ukrainian officials and served to distinguish Poland as a partner of exceptional reliability within Kyiv's hierarchy of Western allies ^[8]. The personal relationships cultivated through this intensive bilateral engagement also provided channels for managing the periodic bilateral disputes — most notably over Ukrainian grain exports and the politically sensitive question of historical memory concerning the Volhynia massacres — that threatened to disrupt the broader cooperative framework without, in the event, fundamentally undermining it.

Within the European Union, Poland's role as a norm entrepreneur on matters relating to sanctions against Russia and to Ukraine's accession pathway was both consistent and, by measurable indicators, effective. Warsaw was among the first EU member states to advocate for comprehensive and rapidly escalating sanctions packages, and Polish governmental communications consistently pressed for maximal rather than incremental approaches to economic pressure on Moscow. The position adopted by Poland on the accession question yielded concrete institutional results: Ukraine was granted official EU candidate status in June 2022, accession negotiations were formally opened in December 2023, the first bilateral screening meetings followed the intergovernmental conference of June 2024, and the screening process was completed in September 2025 ^[11]. That Poland's sustained advocacy within EU institutions contributed to the speed of this progression is difficult to establish with precision, but the temporal correspondence between Warsaw's diplomatic pressure and the acceleration of accession-related decisions is noted in the relevant institutional record.

The NATO dimension of Polish diplomatic activity centred substantially on the Bucharest Nine (B9) format, grouping the nine NATO member states on the alliance's eastern flank, which Poland co-led and within which Warsaw functioned as the most influential voice by virtue of its size, geographic position, and defence spending trajectory. The B9 format served as a platform for coordinating eastern flank security concerns, amplifying collective demands for enhanced forward presence, extended deterrence commitments, and accelerated burden-sharing by other Allies. Key achievements associated, at least partly, with this diplomatic pressure included the announcement at the June 2022 NATO Madrid Summit of the permanent stationing of the US Army V Corps Headquarters Forward Command Post in Poland — representing the first permanently stationed US forces on NATO's eastern flank — alongside an Army garrison headquarters and a field support battalion ^[10]. These outcomes represented concrete institutional anchoring of Allied presence on Polish territory and constituted a measurable achievement of the security objectives articulated in Polish governmental policy.

2.3. Military Assistance and Arms Transfers

Poland's military assistance to Ukraine constituted, in volume and political significance, one of the most consequential dimensions of Warsaw's Eastern policy and the domain in which Polish contributions — assessed in relation to gross domestic product and population — ranked among the highest of all Allied states. The decision to transfer military materiel to a non-NATO partner engaged in active hostilities with a major power required the navigation of complex political, operational, and legal considerations, and the speed and scale of Poland's response set a precedent that influenced the decision-making calculus of other Western partners. The military assistance programme may be analysed across four interconnected components: the volume and composition of direct arms transfers, the logistical and transit function performed by Poland, the training of Ukrainian military personnel, and the domestic political economy of these decisions.

In terms of direct arms transfers, Poland delivered a substantial array of military equipment to Ukraine across the period under examination. As documented in the open-source literature, Poland and the Czech Republic were among the first NATO members to transfer significant quantities of Warsaw Pact-era tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in April 2022, representing a critical decision to provide heavy armour at a moment when most Western partners had not yet crossed that threshold ^[14]. Subsequently, Poland transferred PT-91 Twardy main battle tanks, Krab self-propelled howitzers, multiple-launch rocket systems, MiG-29 fighter aircraft, and substantial quantities of ammunition. Quantitative data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute contextualises Poland's contribution within global arms transfer patterns: Poland ranked thirteenth among global arms exporters in the period 2020–24, accounting for one per cent of global arms exports, with ninety-six per cent of Poland's total arms exports during that period directed to Ukraine [12, p. 2]. This concentration of a state's entire arms export profile on a single recipient reflects the exceptional character of Polish military assistance and distinguishes Warsaw's contribution from the more diffuse export profiles of larger supplier states.

The broader global context within which Polish military assistance was delivered is illustrated by data indicating that Ukraine became the world's largest importer of major arms in the period 2020–24, with its imports increasing by approximately nine thousand, six hundred and twenty-seven per cent compared with the preceding five-year period, and accounting for eight point eight per cent of global arms imports during the period [12, p. 1]. The United States remained by far the dominant supplier, accounting for sixty-four per cent of arms imports by European NATO states in 2020–24, a substantially larger share than the fifty-two per cent recorded in 2015–19 [12, p. 1]. Within this Allied division of military labour, Poland occupied a distinctive niche as a high-ratio contributor relative to national economic capacity, with the Congressional Research Service noting that Poland had assumed a leading role among European providers of military assistance and had served as the principal logistics and transit hub for international assistance to Ukraine ^[13]. The United States maintained approximately ten thousand military personnel on rotation in Poland as part of this broader Allied posture ^[10].

Poland's function as the principal logistics corridor for Western military aid to Ukraine constituted a force-multiplying contribution that extended well beyond the direct value of equipment transferred under Polish bilateral programmes. The geographic position of Poland as the primary land transit route between Western Europe and Ukraine's western border rendered Polish territory indispensable to the Allied assistance effort, and the investments made in border infrastructure, customs facilitation, and military logistics capacity enabled the rapid throughput of materiel from multiple contributing states. Training programmes conducted on Polish territory for Ukrainian military personnel further amplified the operational significance of Poland's contribution. The domestic political economy of these military assistance decisions was not without complexity: debates within successive Polish coalition governments concerning the appropriate pace of heavy equipment deliveries — given the concurrent requirement to fund an ambitious national defence modernisation programme targeting four per cent of gross domestic product in 2024 and four point seven per cent in 2025 ^[13] — reflected genuine tension between solidarity commitments to Ukraine and the imperatives of Polish national defence investment. These tensions were, however, managed within the framework of a broad political consensus on the fundamental priority of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression.

The arms transfers carried political significance that extended beyond their immediate military utility. The following categories of materiel were transferred by Poland to Ukraine across the principal phases of the conflict:

• Soviet-era and post-Soviet main battle tanks, including PT-91 Twardy units, transferred in the spring and summer of 2022 alongside Czech and Slovak contributions;
• MiG-29 fighter aircraft, announced in March 2023, making Poland and Slovakia the first NATO members to transfer fixed-wing combat aircraft to Ukraine ^[14];
• Krab self-propelled howitzers, constituting a significant contribution of domestically produced NATO-standard artillery;
• Multiple-launch rocket systems and associated ammunition, delivered as part of a coordinated Allied effort to restore Ukrainian long-range fire capabilities;
• Anti-aircraft systems and air defence components, transferred in response to Russia's sustained campaign of aerial attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure;
• Logistical equipment, fuel, uniforms, medical supplies, and personal protective equipment across all phases of the conflict.

Each of these transfer decisions involved the crossing of self-imposed or Allied-coordinated red lines concerning the types of equipment considered transferable without unacceptable escalation risk, and each created precedents that facilitated subsequent decisions by other Allied states to expand the scope of their contributions ^[14]. In this sense, Polish military assistance served not merely as a direct input to Ukrainian defence capacity but also as a normative and political driver of the broader Allied assistance effort, demonstrating that the transfer of heavy and sophisticated military systems was politically and operationally feasible without triggering the catastrophic escalation scenarios that had initially constrained the ambitions of some Western partners.

2.4. Humanitarian Response and Refugee Policy

The humanitarian dimension of Poland's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine represented the most immediately visible and socially consequential aspect of Warsaw's Eastern policy in the months following February 2022. The scale of the refugee influx was without precedent in contemporary European history: within weeks of the onset of full-scale hostilities, Poland had become the primary destination for Ukrainian civilians fleeing the conflict, receiving more than fifty per cent of all refugees recorded by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the initial phase of the crisis ^[19]. As of 18 March 2022, UNHCR reported that more than three point two million refugees — approximately half of whom were estimated to be children — had fled recent hostilities in Ukraine, with Poland having received more than one point nine million persons by that date ^[19]. By mid-May 2022, approximately three point five million persons had crossed the Polish border since the commencement of hostilities ^[9]. The management of this extraordinary population movement constituted both a humanitarian imperative and a significant test of Polish state capacity, social cohesion, and political will.

The initial reception phase was characterised by a mobilisation of civil society on a scale that partially substituted for — and in several respects preceded — the organisational capacity of state institutions. Polish citizens, municipalities, non-governmental organisations, and diaspora communities provided immediate shelter, food, transportation, and basic necessities to arrivals at a pace and scope that exceeded the readiness of formal reception systems. The legislative response was correspondingly rapid: Polish authorities implemented frameworks enabling Ukrainian citizens to access the national labour market, healthcare system, and educational infrastructure under temporary protection arrangements aligned with the European Union's activation of the Temporary Protection Directive on 4 March 2022, which provided Ukrainian nationals and other legal residents of Ukraine with immediate rights of residency, work permits, housing, healthcare, and education across EU member states ^[17]. The Polish government established an emergency assistance fund to support refugee reception, healthcare access, and social services ^[19]. Warsaw, as the largest destination city within Poland, received more than three hundred thousand refugees, increasing its population by fifteen per cent, and the city's mayor publicly acknowledged that municipal capacity was under severe strain ^[19].

The demographic composition of the refugee population presented particular integration challenges and opportunities. As approximately ninety per cent of registered refugees were women and children ^[17], and as Ukrainian men of military age between eighteen and sixty were prohibited from leaving the country under martial law provisions, the Polish labour market received a population skewed toward persons whose integration pathways differed substantially from those of typical economic migrants. Research examining analogous refugee situations suggested that language barriers would constitute a significant obstacle to labour market integration, and that occupational downgrading — whereby highly qualified refugees were employed in positions below their educational level — carried risks of labour market congestion in lower-skill segments and potential for social friction ^[18]. Pre-existing structural features of the Polish labour market, characterised by persistently low unemployment and sustained demand for labour across skill levels in the post-pandemic period, partially mitigated these risks in the near term, but medium-term integration challenges remained substantial ^[9].

The juxtaposition of Poland's open and indeed generous reception of Ukrainian refugees with the restrictive and at times physically coercive posture adopted simultaneously toward asylum seekers arriving via Belarus attracted international comment and generated domestic political debate. Critics observed that the differential treatment of displaced persons on the basis of national origin or route of entry raised questions of consistency regarding Poland's adherence to universal humanitarian principles, while defenders of the Polish governmental position distinguished between instrumentalised hybrid migration deployed by the Belarusian and Russian states and the genuine refugee flows generated by Russian military aggression against a neighbouring sovereign state. This tension, whatever its normative resolution, illuminates the degree to which refugee policy in the Polish case was inseparable from geopolitical calculation and strategic framing, rather than being grounded in a uniform application of humanitarian norms irrespective of political context ^[8]. The long-term sustainability of Polish public support for the refugee presence also emerged as a policy concern as the conflict extended into its second and subsequent years, with polling data indicating a gradual erosion of the exceptional solidarity witnessed in the initial crisis period and a growing salience of fiscal cost considerations in public discourse.

2.5. Economic Instruments: Sanctions Implementation, Trade Adjustment, and Reconstruction Commitments

The economic dimension of Poland's Eastern policy encompassed three interconnected domains: the implementation of European Union sanctions against the Russian Federation and the domestic economic costs thereby incurred, the adjustment of Polish-Ukrainian trade and transit relations disrupted by wartime conditions, and Warsaw's positioning within the emerging multilateral architecture of Ukrainian post-war reconstruction financing. Across each of these domains, Poland adopted postures that were consistent with its declared political objectives but that also generated specific domestic economic pressures and distributional conflicts, illustrating the degree to which foreign policy choices carry domestic economic consequences that must be managed if political sustainability is to be maintained.

Poland's advocacy for progressively tighter EU sanctions against Russia was consistent and early, with Warsaw pressing for comprehensive measures from the outset of the conflict and consistently arguing against incremental approaches that might leave meaningful economic channels intact. The successive packages of EU sanctions adopted from February 2022 onward — encompassing financial sector restrictions, asset freezes, travel bans, export controls on dual-use goods, energy import restrictions, and measures targeting the so-called shadow fleet used to circumvent oil price caps — were supported by Poland at each stage, frequently with calls for acceleration or strengthening of proposed measures. The domestic economic consequences of sanctions compliance were, however, significant. Poland's pre-war economic relations with Russia, while considerably less intense than those of several larger Western European states, included energy import dependencies that required rapid structural adjustment. The accelerated diversification of gas and oil supply chains — including investments in liquefied natural gas import infrastructure and the development of pipeline connections to alternative suppliers — imposed substantial near-term costs on the Polish economy and required fiscal interventions to shield households and energy-intensive industries from price volatility ^[13].

The question of utilising immobilised Russian sovereign assets — estimated at approximately three hundred billion euros held in Western financial institutions, the majority immobilised through EU legal instruments — for Ukrainian reconstruction purposes became a central axis of Polish diplomatic engagement within EU economic policy discussions. Warsaw's position, articulated consistently across successive European Council deliberations, supported the mobilisation of proceeds generated by these assets for Ukrainian reconstruction financing, and subsequently endorsed proposals for instruments such as the Ukraine Support Loan mechanism, which utilised projected interest revenues as collateral for long-term financing commitments to Kyiv ^[11]. The legal and political complexity of these instruments — given the contested status of sovereign asset confiscation under international law — necessitated sustained diplomatic engagement within EU institutions and with key member state governments, and Poland's advocacy contributed to the eventual operationalisation of mechanisms providing substantial financial transfers to Ukraine.

The most acute domestic political tension generated by the economic dimensions of Poland's Eastern policy concerned the transit and import of Ukrainian agricultural commodities, particularly grain. The disruption of Black Sea export routes by the Russian navy created substantial pressure on alternative overland and river transit corridors through Central European states, and the sudden increase in volumes of Ukrainian grain transiting or entering Polish markets generated acute competitive pressure on Polish agricultural producers, whose interests were represented by powerful agrarian organisations with close ties to Polish political parties across the spectrum. The Polish government, facing electoral pressures and organised farmer protests, introduced temporary unilateral import restrictions on Ukrainian agricultural products in 2023, triggering a diplomatic dispute with Kyiv that was managed with difficulty within the framework of bilateral relations and EU mediation. The episode illustrated the degree to which solidarity commitments, however sincerely held at the level of high politics, are subject to revision when they impose concentrated economic costs on domestically influential constituencies ^[8].

Warsaw's engagement with the broader architecture of Ukrainian reconstruction financing, including participation in Ukraine Recovery Conference frameworks and the articulation of bilateral reconstruction memoranda, reflected the strategic understanding that the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine would constitute a geopolitical contest as well as an economic opportunity, with states that established early commitments and institutional presences positioned to exercise influence over both the process and the outcomes of reconstruction. Poland's declared ambitions in this domain were substantial, premised on geographic proximity, established economic relationships, and the experience of Polish enterprises in infrastructure development and public administration reform in neighbouring markets. The gap between declaratory commitment and actual financial instruments mobilised, however, remained a source of observation among analysts assessing the credibility of Warsaw's reconstruction engagement, particularly in comparison with larger EU member states and international financial institutions whose resource mobilisation capacity exceeded Poland's by significant margins. The Ukraine Recovery Conference held in Gdańsk in June 2026 provided a renewed platform for Polish reconstruction diplomacy ^[11], but the translation of political positioning into concrete economic commitments remained an ongoing challenge for Polish policy across the period under examination. It should be noted that the European Peace Facility had mobilised seven tranches of financial resources totalling three point six billion euros directed toward covering Ukrainian matériel and ammunition needs as of February 2023, reflecting the EU-wide institutional investment in sustaining Ukrainian defence capacity that complemented bilateral national contributions [15, p. 3].

The economic instruments dimension of Poland's Eastern policy thus presents a more complex and contested picture than the relatively unambiguous record of military and humanitarian engagement. Sanctions advocacy was consistent and politically cost-bearing, reflecting genuine alignment between Warsaw's foreign policy objectives and its EU institutional behaviour. Trade adjustment generated domestic political tensions that required pragmatic management, including measures that created bilateral friction with Kyiv. Reconstruction engagement was declared at an ambitious level but implemented with instruments whose adequacy remained subject to critical scrutiny. Taken together, the economic instruments deployed by Poland toward Ukraine in the period 2022–2026 reflect the structural constraints facing a middle power whose foreign policy ambitions are genuine but whose resource base limits the financial scale of its contributions relative to the magnitude of Ukrainian needs — a tension between political will and economic capacity that constitutes one of the defining characteristics of Poland's position in the management of this crisis, and one that would require continued strategic management in the period following the cessation of active hostilities.

Chapter 3: Assessment of Outcomes and the Future Trajectory of Polish–Ukrainian Relations

The preceding chapter documented the range of instruments deployed by Poland in the pursuit of its Eastern policy objectives across the period from February 2022 to mid-2026. The present chapter turns to the question of outcomes: to what extent were those objectives achieved, what tensions and unintended consequences were generated, and what implications follow for the future trajectory of the bilateral relationship and for the broader assessment of Poland as a foreign policy actor. The assessment proceeds through five analytical lenses — security outcomes on NATO's eastern flank, political outcomes regarding Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic integration, the evolution of the bilateral relationship between Warsaw and Kyiv, the domestic political constraints that shaped and at times limited Eastern policy, and a synthesising evaluation of policy effectiveness drawing upon the conceptual framework established in Chapter 1.

3.1. Security Outcomes: Deterrence, Alliance Cohesion, and the Eastern Flank

The concept of deterrence, as operationalised for the purposes of this assessment, refers to the capacity of NATO and its member states to persuade potential adversaries that the costs of military aggression against Alliance territory would exceed any anticipated benefits, thereby preventing the initiation of conflict. For Poland, which had long regarded the credibility of Article 5 guarantees as the cornerstone of its national security architecture, the period following February 2022 represented both the most acute validation of its security anxieties and the most significant opportunity to translate political advocacy into material improvements in the Alliance's eastern posture. The degree to which Poland succeeded in this endeavour constitutes the primary evaluative question of this subchapter, and the available evidence supports a broadly positive assessment qualified by the acknowledgement of residual structural limitations that prevented the complete attainment of declared security objectives.

The trajectory of Allied force deployments on Polish territory across the period under examination provides the most concrete evidence of security outcome attainment. Prior to February 2022, the Enhanced Forward Presence battalion deployed to Poland under the framework established at the 2016 Warsaw NATO summit represented a symbolic rather than operationally decisive commitment, designed primarily to signal Alliance resolve rather than to provide a credible forward defence capability. The full-scale Russian invasion fundamentally altered the political calculus of Allied governments regarding force posture on the eastern flank, and Poland's sustained advocacy within NATO structures contributed to a qualitative shift in the ambition of Alliance deployments. The transformation of the United States V Corps forward headquarters in Poznań from a rotational to a permanent installation, formalised through the 2023 defence cooperation addendum, represented a particularly significant outcome from the Polish perspective, as it established a degree of institutional permanence that transcended the political variability of successive administrations. The Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, assumed in January 2025 at a moment of acute transatlantic uncertainty, explicitly framed defence cooperation with the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and other non-EU partners as a priority within the security dimension of its presidential programme, as well as supporting physical border infrastructure through the East Shield and Baltic Defence Line initiatives ^[24], reflecting the strategic importance that Warsaw attached to maintaining the credibility of Allied commitments even under conditions of heightened structural uncertainty.

The enhancement of Polish indigenous military capabilities constituted a second and complementary dimension of security outcome achievement. Poland's commitment to allocate four per cent of gross domestic product to defence expenditure — a figure that substantially exceeded the NATO two per cent guideline and that represented the highest defence spending share among Alliance members — was accompanied by a procurement programme of considerable scope and ambition, encompassing the acquisition of F-35A multirole aircraft, HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems, Abrams M1A2 main battle tanks, and the K2 Black Panther programme conducted in partnership with the Republic of Korea. These acquisitions collectively represented a comprehensive modernisation of Polish ground and air capabilities that was explicitly framed in terms of deterrence by denial — that is, the capacity to impose unacceptable costs on any aggressor contemplating conventional military action against Polish territory. The strategic rationale for this build-up was deeply influenced by the lessons drawn from the war in Ukraine, where the capacity of a defending state to impose sustained attrition on a technologically and numerically superior attacker had demonstrated the operational significance of precisely the class of weapon systems under acquisition. The Polish Presidency programme situated these national capability investments within a broader regional framework encompassing the East Shield and Baltic Defence Line as components of a layered territorial defence architecture integrating national and Alliance-wide elements ^[24].

The functioning of the Bucharest Nine grouping as a coherence mechanism within NATO deserves particular attention as an indicator of Poland's capacity to shape Alliance posture through sustained coalition building. The B9, comprising the nine member states on NATO's eastern flank that had acceded to the Alliance following the end of the Cold War, provided an institutionalised format within which Poland could coordinate positions with likeminded partners and present consolidated policy preferences in the deliberative processes preceding Alliance summits. The degree to which positions articulated within the B9 format were subsequently reflected in the communiqués adopted at the Madrid summit of 2022 and the Vilnius summit of 2023 — particularly regarding the transformation of Enhanced Forward Presence into Forward Defence, the rejection of the concept of spheres of influence as a legitimate framework for European security, and the strengthening of language regarding Article 5 credibility — constitutes measurable evidence of Polish agenda-setting influence within the Alliance. The Centre for European Reform's assessment of European security noted the growing awareness among European governments that structural dependencies on American commitment had become a source of strategic vulnerability ^[25], a concern that had been articulated by Warsaw well before it achieved broad acceptance across the Alliance and whose policy implications were directly reflected in the Polish Presidency's security framework.

Residual limitations in security outcome attainment must nonetheless be acknowledged with candour. The most fundamental constraint concerned the situation of Ukraine itself: as long as that state remained outside the NATO Alliance, the deterrence posture that Poland had contributed to strengthening did not extend to the country facing the most immediate and intensive Russian military pressure. The Vilnius summit's formulation that Ukraine's future lay "in NATO" without specification of a timeline or a Membership Action Plan represented a diplomatic compromise that fell short of the commitments for which Poland had argued, reflecting the structural reality that Alliance decisions require consensus and that several member states remained unwilling to accept the political costs associated with a firm Ukrainian membership commitment under wartime conditions. Furthermore, the revelations regarding the fragility of American transatlantic commitments under the second Trump administration — including the holding of a bilateral summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August 2025 that generated considerable European anxiety ^[25], as well as the November 2025 American peace plan characterised as rewarding Russian aggression while weakening Ukrainian defensive capacity ^[25] — demonstrated the degree to which Polish security architecture remained dependent on political variables outside Warsaw's control. These limitations do not negate the substantial security outcomes achieved; they contextualise those achievements within a broader strategic environment that remained volatile and that placed demands on Polish foreign policy likely to intensify rather than diminish in the medium term.

3.2. Political Outcomes: Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic Trajectory and Polish Influence

The assessment of political outcomes in the domain of Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic integration requires a methodologically careful approach, since the attribution of specific outcomes to Polish diplomatic initiative, as opposed to the broader geopolitical pressures generated by Russian military aggression, involves analytical judgements that cannot be resolved with precision. It is nevertheless possible to identify the specific contributions made by Polish diplomatic engagement and to assess whether the objectives articulated by Warsaw were achieved in whole, in part, or not at all. The record of the period from 2022 to 2026 reveals a pattern of partial achievement: Poland succeeded in catalysing and sustaining political momentum for Ukrainian Euro-Atlantic integration within multilateral institutions, but remained constrained in its capacity to determine the pace and content of those processes by the structural characteristics of the organisations within which it operated and by the countervailing preferences of member states whose resource weight and institutional influence substantially exceeded those of Poland.

The granting of European Union candidate status to Ukraine and Moldova in June 2022 constituted the most consequential near-term political outcome of the post-February 2022 period, and Polish diplomatic engagement was an important, though not singular, contributor to this outcome. The unprecedented speed with which candidate status was conferred — within months of the application submitted by Kyiv — reflected the geopolitical shock of the Russian invasion and the transformed political calculus of EU member states that had previously been sceptical of enlargement on economic or institutional grounds. As documented in the European Council on Foreign Relations analysis of EU enlargement, governments that had actively resisted enlargement in previous years underwent a significant reorientation of their positions, with French president Emmanuel Macron declaring in Bratislava in May 2023 that the question was "not whether we should enlarge" but "how we should do it", and German chancellor Olaf Scholz affirming that the decision for "a larger Europe" was a matter not of altruism but of securing lasting peace following what he termed the Zeitenwende of Russian aggression ^[23]. Poland's contribution was to ensure that this emerging political consensus was rapidly translated into formal institutional decision, and that the momentum generated by the acute crisis phase was not allowed to dissipate as attention shifted to other dimensions of the conflict response. The geopolitical rationale for enlargement articulated by national researchers across thirteen EU member states — that it constituted a way to respond to structural changes in the European security environment — was one that Polish policymakers had advanced for considerably longer than the immediate crisis period ^[23].

The role of the Visegrad Four countries and their associated formats in advocacy for Ukrainian EU membership is documented extensively in the available literature. The V4 grouping had historically positioned itself as among the most vocal advocates for eastern enlargement within EU structures, with its joint declaration at the 2004 Prime Ministers' Summit affirming support for other countries aspiring to EU and NATO membership as a contribution to the continued process of European integration [22, p. 5]. This advocacy intensified significantly in the post-2022 period, with the International Visegrad Fund and the V4+ format of ministerial meetings providing channels through which practical support and political engagement for the Eastern Partnership states could be mobilised [22, p. 4–5]. The V4 countries had held regular meetings dedicated to the Eastern Partnership since 2010, with EaP counterparts included from 2012, and had developed the habit of coordinating positions with Baltic states, Finland, Sweden, and EU institutional representatives, thereby constructing the broader coalition architecture within which Polish advocacy operated [22, p. 6]. Poland's convening role within the Lublin Triangle format — bringing together Warsaw, Kyiv, and Vilnius as a dedicated consultative mechanism — complemented these multilateral channels. The opening of formal EU accession negotiations with Ukraine in June 2024 represented a further milestone whose acceleration Polish diplomacy had consistently sought [22, p. 5–6], though the pace of this process was determined primarily by the European Commission's conditionality assessment and by the collective decisions of member states whose strategic calculations extended beyond the bilateral Polish–Ukrainian relationship.

The Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, assumed in January 2025 under the motto "Security, Europe!", provided an institutionalised vehicle for the exercise of Polish agenda-setting influence on the enlargement question at a moment of heightened geopolitical significance. Foreign Minister Sikorski's announcement that Poland would work during its Presidency to update and reinvigorate the Eastern Partnership format — co-initiated by Poland and Sweden in 2009 and whose eastern dimension had acquired renewed relevance in the post-invasion context — reflected Warsaw's strategic understanding that EU neighbourhood instruments required recalibration in light of the transformed European security environment ^[24]. The Presidency programme also committed to advancing the accession processes of Moldova and the Western Balkan states, thereby embedding Ukrainian accession within a broader enlargement logic rather than treating it as an isolated geopolitical exception ^[24]. The acknowledgement that Poland's successful democratic transition and twenty years of EU membership positioned it as a credible promoter of the integration path for Eastern Partnership countries ^[24] reflected an accurate reading of Warsaw's comparative advantage as a broker between aspiring states and more hesitant member states in Western and Southern Europe.

On the NATO membership track, the political outcomes achieved were more limited, reflecting both the greater structural rigidity of consensus decision-making within the Alliance and the particular sensitivity of the issue given that Ukraine was actively engaged in hostilities with a nuclear-armed adversary. The language adopted at the Vilnius summit of 2023 — affirming that Ukraine's future lay within NATO while declining to specify a timeline or a formal procedural pathway — represented a compromise that preserved the principle while deferring its implementation indefinitely. The NATO summit held at The Hague in June 2025 produced a five-paragraph declaration that included only the briefest mention of Ukraine, with no repetition of previous membership promises and no reference to EU-NATO cooperation, a minimalist outcome that hinted at the growing differences between the United States and its European allies about the future of European security rather than any reversion of Polish or Baltic positions ^[25]. This outcome reinforced Warsaw's strategic assessment that the consolidation of NATO's eastern flank and the enhancement of European autonomous defence capacity represented the most achievable near-term security objectives given the constraints on the Ukrainian membership question, and that Polish influence within multilateral frameworks was most effectively exercised through the steady construction of material facts — force deployments, capability investments, institutional formats — rather than through the pursuit of declaratory breakthroughs that faced structural opposition from larger Allied powers.

3.3. Bilateral Relationship: Achievements, Tensions, and Unresolved Disputes

The Polish–Ukrainian bilateral relationship in the period from 2022 to 2026 cannot be adequately characterised by reference either to the extraordinary solidarity of the initial crisis response or to the mounting tensions that accumulated over subsequent years; rather, it requires analysis as a complex and evolving relationship in which genuine strategic alignment coexisted with equally genuine domestic political pressures on both sides that periodically generated friction and constrained the relationship's room for manoeuvre. The concept of asymmetric solidarity — deep commonality of strategic interest at the level of macro-objectives, combined with divergent domestic political imperatives at the level of specific policy domains — offers the most analytically accurate framing for a relationship that was neither the seamless partnership that official rhetoric sometimes suggested nor the antagonistic standoff that polemical commentary occasionally implied. As the German Marshall Fund analysis of January 2026 observed, what had initially appeared to be a long-term strategic partnership grounded in shared security interests had evolved into a more fragmented and fragile relationship, visible across political, economic, and social dimensions ^[20], though this characterisation requires the qualification that fragmentation and fragility at the level of specific issue areas coexisted with the sustained operational cooperation that defined the strategic core of the relationship.

The operational achievements of the bilateral relationship deserve recognition as genuine and consequential outcomes with measurable strategic significance. The Polish–Ukrainian border corridor functioned throughout the period as the primary logistics and humanitarian artery through which the overwhelming majority of Western military equipment, humanitarian aid, and civilian transits were channelled, a function that required sustained administrative cooperation, customs harmonisation, and security coordination between Polish and Ukrainian authorities under conditions of considerable operational pressure. The regularisation of bilateral consultation mechanisms, including frequent presidential and prime ministerial summits and the institutionalisation of joint defence planning formats, provided a structural foundation for strategic alignment that outlasted the initial solidarity phase and persisted even during periods of heightened bilateral tension on secondary issues. Poland's function as a transit and training hub for Ukrainian military personnel familiarising themselves with Western weapon systems — including artillery platforms, armoured vehicles, and air defence systems supplied by Allied nations — constituted a direct contribution to Ukrainian defence capacity that was operationally significant, even where the full extent of such cooperation was necessarily restricted in public documentation for security reasons. The broader integration of Poland into Allied logistics networks sustaining Ukrainian defence capacity reflected a strategic positioning that generated practical operational value extending considerably beyond the bilateral relationship itself.

The most persistent and politically salient source of bilateral tension in the period under examination was the dispute over historical memory, centred on the events of 1943–1945 in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Historical determinants of the bilateral relationship extend deep into the modern era, with long-standing rivalries, religious divisions, and competing national narratives having shaped the relationship between Polish and Ukrainian communities across centuries of shared and contested territorial history [21, p. 84–85]. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was responsible for the brutal ethnic cleansing of the Polish civilian population in these regions, resulting in deaths estimated at more than 100,000 people in 1943 and 1944, an event denominated in Polish historiography as the Volhynia slaughter [21, p. 87]. These events opened a serious wound in Polish–Ukrainian relations, with both societies subsequently attributing to one another responsibility for their wartime sufferings, a dynamic that Communist authorities on both sides suppressed rather than resolved and that therefore persisted into the post-Cold War period [21, p. 88]. The context of wartime solidarity initially suppressed the political salience of this dispute, as both societies consciously set aside contested historical narratives in favour of the imperative of practical cooperation in the face of Russian aggression ^[20]. As the conflict entered its protracted phase, however, domestic political actors in Poland found increasing incentive to mobilise the historical memory issue for electoral purposes, with the appointment of a special ambassador for "historical diplomacy" by President Nawrocki in August 2025 and the Polish Sejm's designation of 11 July as a day of commemoration for victims of Ukrainian nationalist "genocide" generating a sharp diplomatic response from Kyiv's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which characterised the decision as "inconsistent with the spirit of good-neighbourly relations" ^[20].

Ukraine's engagement with the historical memory dispute reflected a combination of diplomatic caution and practical gesture that fell short of the unequivocal acknowledgement sought by Polish political actors but that nonetheless represented meaningful progress in the domain of transitional reconciliation. The resumption of joint exhumations and reburials of Volhynia victims in 2025, welcomed by both sides, illustrated the potential for practical cooperation to yield results where formal political declarations had failed ^[20]. The Mieroszewski Centre's survey of Polish public opinion, conducted on a representative group of respondents in November and December 2024, found that approximately 46 per cent of Polish respondents claimed some knowledge of the Volhynian massacre, with almost half of total respondents expressing the view that difficult historical topics required resolution in bilateral relations, and respondents particularly frequently mentioning the need for exhumation of victims as a condition for building lasting bilateral relations ^[26]. These data illuminate the degree to which historical memory constitutes not merely an elite political preoccupation but a dimension of bilateral relations that resonates with significant segments of the Polish public and that therefore constrains the freedom of manoeuvre available to Polish governments seeking to manage this issue in ways that would minimise its impact on the security cooperation track.

The agricultural trade conflict represented a second distinct source of bilateral tension with different structural origins but equally significant bilateral consequences. The competitive pressure generated by Ukrainian grain and oilseed imports entering Polish markets through solidarity trade corridors activated powerful domestic agrarian constituencies, producing unilateral Polish import restrictions that strained bilateral relations and were challenged at the World Trade Organisation. From the Ukrainian perspective, such protectionist measures represented a troubling signal that solidarity commitments were subject to revision when they imposed concentrated costs on domestically influential interest groups, with Ukrainian officials expressing frustration that such actions risked undermining broader European solidarity ^[20]. The gradual de-escalation of the most acute phase of the agricultural dispute through EU-mediated arrangements did not resolve the underlying structural tension between Polish agricultural producers' interests and Ukraine's need to maintain export revenue as a component of wartime economic sustainability, and Poland continued to support selective import limitations even after the most visible protests had subsided ^[20]. This episode serves as a case study in the limits of instrument adequacy analysed in the subsequent subchapter.

Among the unresolved disputes that defined the bilateral relationship's trajectory into the post-2026 period, the question of the long-term status of Ukrainian refugees in Poland assumed increasing policy salience. The demographic shift represented by the presence of nearly one million refugees — approximately 2.5 per cent of the Polish population — under temporary protection, in addition to the approximately 1.3 to 1.5 million Ukrainian migrant workers and long-term residents already present before the war, had made the demographic impact of Ukrainian migration far more perceptible in Polish society ^[20]. While integration achievements were substantial — with around 69 per cent of working-age Ukrainian refugees employed and over 200,000 Ukrainian children enrolled in Polish schools ^[20] — the scale of cohabitation had generated competition for public services, cultural misunderstandings, and rising local frustration that proved politically exploitable. The Mieroszewski Centre's polling data revealed that 51 per cent of Polish respondents believed the scale of assistance provided to Ukrainian refugees was too large, while 56 per cent expected Ukrainian refugees to return to their country following the conclusion of hostilities ^[26]. President Nawrocki's August 2025 veto of a bill extending social benefits to Ukrainian refugees unless tied to employment, and the finding of the BGK national development bank that Ukrainians paid more in taxes and social contributions than the value of benefits they received from the state ^[20], illustrated the complex and contested terrain on which refugee policy intersected with bilateral relations and domestic political competition.

3.4. Domestic Political Dimensions and Constraints on Eastern Policy

The proposition that foreign policy is shaped not only by the external strategic environment but also by the internal political dynamics of the state pursuing that policy constitutes one of the foundational insights of the two-level game literature and its various elaborations in contemporary international relations scholarship. The Polish case in the period from 2022 to 2026 illustrates this proposition with considerable clarity: the formulation and implementation of Eastern policy was constrained, enabled, and at times distorted by partisan competition, institutional transitions, and the evolution of public opinion in ways that a purely geopolitical analysis would fail to capture. Two analytically distinct sub-periods can be identified within this domestic political dimension: the period of Law and Justice governance until October 2023, and the subsequent Tusk-led coalition government, with the October 2023 parliamentary elections constituting the critical juncture between them and the axis around which the most significant recalibration of Poland's multilateral engagement was organised.

The Law and Justice administration's approach to Eastern policy was characterised by a particular combination of robust security advocacy, generous refugee reception, and periodic rhetorical confrontation with Kyiv over historical memory and with Brussels over rule-of-law disputes that complicated Poland's capacity to mobilise EU resources efficiently in the service of Eastern policy objectives. The PiS government had been among the most vocal advocates for NATO's eastern flank reinforcement and had overseen the initiation of the most significant Polish military modernisation programme in decades. At the same time, it faced genuine pressure from segments of its electoral base on issues directly related to the refugee presence, including competition for housing and school places, the rise in rental prices, and social anxieties generated by the rapid demographic change in Polish cities and communities ^[24]. The political exploitation of refugee-related anxieties by right-wing actors operating within the broader PiS political ecosystem — including the Konfederacja grouping whose presidential candidate had combined anti-migration rhetoric with direct criticism of Ukrainian refugees during the 2025 presidential campaign ^[20] — illustrated the structural tension between the government's declared solidarity commitments and the political incentives faced by actors within its own political environment. The rule-of-law disputes with the European Commission that had resulted in the temporary withholding of EU cohesion and Recovery Fund transfers to Poland during this period constituted an additional constraint, introducing a systemic tension between Polish EU institutional behaviour and its declared ambitions as an EU advocate for Ukrainian interests.

The October 2023 parliamentary elections and the subsequent formation of the Tusk-led coalition government represented a significant domestic political transition with material implications for the management of Eastern policy. The restoration of formal compliance with EU rule-of-law requirements as a declared priority of the new government, and the accompanying normalisation of Poland's institutional relationship with the European Commission and key member state governments, removed a structural constraint that had complicated Polish advocacy within EU frameworks and diminished Warsaw's persuasive capacity with large member states whose alignment was essential for advancing positions on sanctions, accession timelines, and defence cooperation ^[24]. The assumption of the EU Council Presidency in January 2025 represented a particularly significant manifestation of this restored institutional standing, providing Poland with formal agenda-setting authority within EU deliberative processes at a moment of acute geopolitical significance when the evolution of United States policy under the Trump administration had introduced unprecedented uncertainty into the Euro-Atlantic security architecture ^[24]. The degree of substantive policy continuity between the two governments on the core security commitments of Eastern policy — arms transfers to Ukraine, NATO eastern flank advocacy, sanctions compliance — was nonetheless notable, reflecting the degree to which cross-party consensus on these fundamentals insulated the most critical policy areas from partisan disruption.

The constraints imposed by public opinion on Eastern policy warrant careful analysis based on the available empirical evidence. The Mieroszewski Centre's 2024 survey findings revealed a nuanced configuration in which support for Ukrainian defence and EU integration coexisted with significant domestic anxieties about the costs and duration of the refugee presence. According to these findings, 25 per cent of Polish respondents held positive views of Ukrainians, 30 per cent expressed negative opinions, and 41 per cent maintained neutral assessments, with positive sentiment having fallen to its lowest level in years and negative views surpassing positive ones for the first time since 2018 ^[26]. Public support for Ukraine's EU membership stood at 42 per cent in the same survey, with Polish respondents making such support conditional on Ukraine meeting the relevant accession criteria ^[26], a configuration that provided political cover for a government seeking to maintain domestic support for sustained accession advocacy while preserving the conditionality framing that protected against charges of unconditional commitment. The assessment by the BGK national development bank that Ukrainian residents contributed more in taxes and social contributions than they received in state benefits ^[20] addressed the economic dimension of welfare-state concerns, but survey data consistently suggested that economically rational arguments were insufficient to dissolve socially and culturally grounded anxieties about demographic change and national identity that proved responsive to political mobilisation by actors with incentives to amplify rather than moderate such anxieties.

3.5. Effectiveness Assessment and Lessons for Polish Foreign Policy

The synthesis of empirical findings presented in the preceding subchapters permits a structured assessment of the overall effectiveness of Poland's Eastern policy in the period from 2022 to 2026, organised around the three evaluative dimensions established in Chapter 1: objective attainment, instrument adequacy, and strategic learning. This assessment recognises that effectiveness cannot be evaluated in absolute terms but must be calibrated against the realistic range of outcomes available to a middle-sized state operating within multilateral frameworks, under conditions of unprecedented geopolitical pressure, and in pursuit of objectives whose attainment was contingent on the decisions of numerous other actors whose interests only partially aligned with those of Warsaw. The broader context of European security in this period — characterised by Russian military aggression, unprecedented transatlantic uncertainty generated by the Trump administration's posture toward NATO, and the structural stresses of simultaneous EU enlargement deliberations and internal governance debates — imposed constraints on Polish policy that were genuinely structural rather than merely contingent on the quality of individual policy choices ^[25].

The evaluation of objective attainment yields a differentiated verdict across the established hierarchy of Polish Eastern policy goals. The highest-priority objective — the prevention of a rapid Russian military defeat of Ukrainian resistance — was achieved for the period under examination, though attribution to Polish policy as opposed to Ukrainian military capacity, aggregate Allied support, or Russian strategic miscalculation is necessarily complex and resists any simple monocausal interpretation. Poland's contributions to Ukrainian military resilience, through arms transfers, logistics facilitation, and training provision, constituted one input among many into a strategic outcome that reflected the cumulative effect of multiple actors' decisions across a prolonged period. The objective of strengthening NATO's eastern flank was substantially achieved, with the trajectory from rotational deployments to permanent Allied infrastructure in Poland, combined with the Polish military modernisation programme, representing durable security improvements that outlasted the political circumstances of any particular government ^[24]. The objective of advancing Ukraine's EU candidate status and the opening of formal accession negotiations was achieved within the period under review, with Polish advocacy constituting an important contributing factor within the broader geopolitical transformation of EU member states' enlargement calculations ^[23]. The objective of maintaining a functional bilateral relationship with Ukraine was achieved in a qualified sense: the relationship sustained cooperative momentum across its most critical operational dimensions while accumulating unresolved tensions in secondary issue areas that will require continued management in any post-war normalisation phase.

The assessment of instrument adequacy reveals a pattern in which the instruments most closely aligned with Poland's core comparative advantages proved most effective, while instruments requiring either large-scale financial mobilisation or the suppression of domestic distributional conflicts proved less adequate to the objectives they were meant to serve. The following dimensions of instrument performance may be identified:

• Diplomatic coalition-building within NATO's B9 format and within the EU through the Eastern Partnership and enlargement advocacy forums proved to be an area of substantial effectiveness, enabling Poland to leverage its geographic and historical position into institutional agenda-setting influence that exceeded what a strictly capability-based analysis of Polish power resources would have predicted; V4 cooperation, regular ministerial meetings with EaP counterparts, and coordinated position papers provided the infrastructure for this advocacy [22, p. 4–6].
• Military assistance and logistics facilitation constituted an area in which Poland's geographic position and institutional capacity generated clear operational value, with the border corridor and training infrastructure functioning reliably throughout the period as essential components of the broader Allied support architecture for Ukrainian defence.
• Refugee reception represented an area of initial high effectiveness — with Poland receiving approximately one million refugees under temporary protection and achieving employment integration of around 69 per cent of working-age arrivals ^[20] — but one in which the long-term sustainability of the policy framework came under increasing political pressure as the conflict extended and domestic social anxieties intensified.
• Agricultural trade management emerged as a significant area of instrument inadequacy, where the mechanisms available to the Polish government for managing the distributional conflict between agrarian producers' interests and solidarity commitments proved insufficient to prevent unilateral measures that generated bilateral friction and complicated the coherence of EU trade policy toward a candidate state ^[20].
• Reconstruction financing represented an area where Polish declaratory ambition exceeded the financial instruments actually mobilised, reflecting the structural limitation of a middle power's resource base relative to the scale of Ukrainian reconstruction needs, and constituting a gap between political will and economic capacity that remained a defining characteristic of Poland's position throughout the period.

The assessment of strategic learning — the capacity of Polish foreign policy institutions to adapt their approach in response to feedback from the operational environment — presents a mixed picture that reflects both the adaptive potential and the structural rigidities of the Polish foreign policy system. Evidence of adaptive learning can be identified in the evolution of Polish diplomatic strategy following the October 2023 governmental transition, which saw the Tusk administration recalibrate Polish EU institutional behaviour in ways that removed the rule-of-law constraint on coalition-building and enhanced Warsaw's persuasive capacity with key European partners. The articulation of a comprehensive security framework during the EU Council Presidency, encompassing not only military defence but also border security, energy security, food security, information security, and health security ^[24], reflected an evolved and multidimensional understanding of the threat environment that went beyond the reactive crisis posture of the immediate post-invasion period. The Presidency's explicit commitment to reinvigorating the Eastern Partnership format ^[24] also demonstrated the recognition that post-war European security would require sustained institutional investment in neighbourhood policy instruments rather than reliance on crisis-driven solidarity alone.

Conversely, the persistence of the historical memory dispute as a recurring source of bilateral friction, despite its repeatedly demonstrated capacity to erode the relational capital accumulated through security cooperation, suggests that strategic learning in the domain of bilateral relationship management was incomplete. The emergence of politically instrumentalised historical memory discourse during the 2025 presidential campaign, the Sejm's legislative action designating a genocide commemoration day, and Kyiv's characterised diplomatic response ^[20] illustrated a pattern in which short-term domestic political incentives consistently outweighed the medium-term costs of allowing this structural fault line to surface in forms damaging to bilateral relations. The Mieroszewski Centre's data indicating that almost half of Polish respondents believed difficult historical issues needed to be resolved ^[26] confirmed that these domestic political pressures were genuine rather than merely confected by elite actors, yet the management of legitimate historical grievance in ways that minimised diplomatic damage to a strategically critical bilateral relationship constitutes precisely the domain in which more sophisticated strategic learning would have been expected to manifest, given the frequency with which the pattern repeated itself across the period under examination.

The situating of the Polish Eastern policy record within the broader scholarly literature on middle-power foreign policy in alliance contexts yields several observations of analytical and practical significance that may be formulated as lessons with transferable implications. The Polish case provides strong evidence in favour of the proposition that credible security investment enhances diplomatic leverage within multilateral alliances: Poland's demonstrated willingness to absorb genuine economic and political costs — in defence spending levels substantially exceeding Allied averages, in energy transition expenditures, in sanctions compliance costs, in the fiscal burden of refugee reception — lent credibility to its advocacy positions in ways that states contributing only political declarations could not replicate. The relationship between material commitment and institutional influence within NATO and the EU, consistently documented across the period under review, supports the inference that middle powers maximise their agenda-setting capacity when they demonstrate readiness to bear costs proportionate to the preferences they are advocating ^[27]. The V4 countries' experience as enlargement advocates similarly illustrated that states whose own positive experience of EU integration was accompanied by concrete bilateral and multilateral support mechanisms — the International Visegrad Fund, technical assistance programmes, ministerial consultation formats — possessed greater advocacy credibility than states whose support was confined to verbal encouragement [22, p. 4].

A second lesson concerns the relationship between historical memory disputes and the moral authority that sustains advocacy roles within international institutions. Poland's credibility as an advocate for Ukrainian sovereignty and European integration was grounded in part on a narrative of shared historical exposure to Russian imperialism that resonated powerfully in the immediate post-invasion period. To the extent that domestic political actors deployed historical memory as an instrument of pressure against Kyiv — framing Ukrainian EU accession as contingent on full acknowledgement of Polish historical grievances — this narrative coherence was partially disrupted, lending credence to perceptions that Polish advocacy was conditional rather than principled. The management of the historical memory dispute therefore constitutes not merely a bilateral relationship management challenge but a strategic communication challenge with implications for Poland's international standing as an actor whose solidarity commitments are unconditional, and whose advocacy within multilateral institutions derives its force precisely from the moral consistency that unconditional commitment projects. The Polish–Ukrainian relationship in this period exhibited, as the German Marshall Fund analysis noted, a fundamental shift from what had initially appeared to be exceptional solidarity to a more fragmented and fragile dynamic ^[20], and the management of that shift in ways that preserve the strategic core of the relationship while addressing legitimate historical grievances constitutes one of the most complex governance challenges facing Polish foreign policy across the period extending beyond the scope of this study.

A third lesson concerns the relationship between domestic political cohesion on core foreign policy objectives and the capacity for sustained external influence. The cross-party consensus on the security fundamentals of Eastern policy that was maintained across the October 2023 governmental transition — support for Ukrainian sovereignty, NATO eastern flank investment, EU sanctions enforcement — provided the institutional continuity that enabled Poland to function as a reliable partner in multilateral frameworks despite the highly contentious character of domestic Polish politics in this period. Where such consensus failed to hold — in the domains of agricultural trade policy, refugee benefit management, and historical memory legislation — domestic political volatility translated directly into bilateral friction and reputational costs that constrained Polish diplomatic capacity. The conclusion that domestic political cohesion on core foreign policy objectives is a prerequisite for the sustained external influence of middle powers operating within multilateral alliances is supported by the Polish experience with considerable force, and suggests that the institutional mechanisms for insulating core security commitments from partisan disruption — whether through parliamentary procedure, constitutional provision, or cultivated elite consensus — represent an investment in foreign policy effectiveness whose value extends far beyond any particular bilateral relationship or crisis context.

In synthesis, Poland's Eastern policy across the period from February 2022 to mid-2026 represents a record of substantial achievement measured against the most critical security objectives, qualified achievement in the domain of political and multilateral goals, and partial success in bilateral relationship management complicated by recurring domestic political pressures that the instruments of Polish foreign policy proved insufficiently equipped to neutralise. The future trajectory of Polish–Ukrainian relations remains subject to profound uncertainties: the duration and outcome of the war, the pace of EU accession negotiations, the evolution of United States commitment to European security under successive administrations — documented as a source of acute strategic anxiety among European analysts and governments alike ^[25] — and the domestic political dynamics of both Poland and Ukraine in a post-war environment whose configurations cannot presently be predicted with confidence. Poland's strategic exposure to these variables makes Eastern policy the central axis of its national security calculus for the foreseeable future, and the effective management of the tensions between solidarity and self-interest, between historical grievance and strategic necessity, and between domestic political imperatives and multilateral diplomatic obligations, constitutes the defining challenge of Polish foreign policy in the era that the Russian invasion of February 2022 inaugurated. The lessons identified in this study — regarding credible commitment, the strategic management of historical memory, and the prerequisites of domestic cohesion for sustained external influence — do not provide a formula for resolving that challenge, but they identify the parameters within which any serious attempt at resolution must be situated.

Conclusion

The present study has examined Poland's Eastern policy toward Ukraine across the period from February 2022 to mid-2026, with the purpose of evaluating the objectives pursued by Warsaw, the instruments deployed in their service, and the outcomes that may be reasonably attributed to Polish policy action within the complex multilateral environment generated by the Russian Federation's full-scale invasion. Three principal analytical conclusions have emerged from this inquiry, each of which carries implications both for the assessment of Polish foreign policy performance and for the broader theoretical understanding of middle power agency within alliance structures during security crises of existential magnitude. The first is that Poland's core security objectives — the consolidation of NATO's eastern flank, the preservation of Ukraine's territorial sovereignty, and the prevention of Russian military success that would fundamentally alter the European security order — were substantially, though not entirely, achieved over the period under examination. The second is that the instruments deployed by Poland in pursuit of these objectives were adequate to the security and diplomatic dimensions of the crisis, while revealing structural limitations in the economic and financial domains that constrained Warsaw's influence over reconstruction and integration processes. The third is that the management of the bilateral relationship between Poland and Ukraine, though characterised by genuine solidarity and political will at the highest level, was complicated by recurring tensions rooted in historical memory, domestic political pressures, and the asymmetry between Polish declaratory ambition and material resource capacity — tensions that remained unresolved at the close of the analytical period and that would shape the trajectory of the relationship in the years to follow.

The theoretical framework established in the opening chapter identified Poland's Eastern policy as the product of an accumulated historical consciousness, a geopolitical role conception derived from the Jagiellonian and Piast traditions elaborated in post-communist strategic discourse, and a commitment to the normative architecture of Euro-Atlantic integration as the primary instrument of regional security. These foundational elements proved to be analytically consequential rather than merely contextual. The activation of Poland's foreign policy apparatus following 24 February 2022 reflected the deep internalisation of threat perceptions and strategic priorities that had been cultivated across three decades of post-communist reorientation, rather than an improvised response to an unanticipated contingency. Warsaw's immediate mobilisation of political support, humanitarian infrastructure, and diplomatic advocacy capacity confirmed the hypothesis, consistent with role theory in Foreign Policy Analysis, that states with strongly internalised role conceptions respond to external stimuli in ways that are structured by those conceptions rather than determined solely by situational calculation. Poland's behaviour across the period under review was thus simultaneously principled and strategic — rooted in a genuine assessment of existential risk and in the recognition that the defence of Ukrainian sovereignty constituted an indivisible component of Poland's own security calculus.

The empirical examination of policy objectives conducted in the second chapter revealed a hierarchy of goals that was broadly consistent across changes of government and across the domestic political contestation that characterised the Polish political environment in this period. The preservation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, the advancement of Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic integration, the consolidation of Allied deterrence on NATO's eastern flank, and the positioning of Poland as a central actor in the management and eventual reconstruction of Ukraine — these objectives were documented across primary sources of successive administrations and were operationalised with a degree of consistency that is notable given the depth of partisan division in other policy domains. The consistency of these objectives is itself a finding of analytical significance, suggesting that on the core questions of eastern policy, Poland possessed a degree of elite consensus that insulated strategic direction from the full volatility of domestic political competition, even as specific instruments and emphases evolved in response to changing circumstances.

The assessment of instruments demonstrated both the strengths and the structural constraints of Polish foreign policy capacity. In the diplomatic domain, Poland's contribution was disproportionate to its formal weight within EU and NATO decision-making structures, reflecting the mobilisation of political capital accumulated through decades of engagement with Eastern partners and the credibility conferred by proximity and demonstrated commitment. The advocacy of accelerated EU accession for Ukraine, the persistent pressure for robust sanctions regimes, and the cultivation of coalition partners within the Three Seas Initiative and Bucharest Nine formats constituted a pattern of multilateral engagement that amplified Polish influence beyond what bilateral resources alone would have permitted ^[2]. In the military domain, Poland's provision of material assistance — including training capacity, transit infrastructure, and advanced weapons systems — represented a contribution whose aggregate significance exceeded initial assessments and established Warsaw as one of the most consequential bilateral contributors to Ukrainian defence capacity among European states. These military and diplomatic achievements constituted the strongest elements of Poland's instrument portfolio, and their success is appropriately assessed as a genuine accomplishment of Polish foreign policy in this period.

The limitations of Polish instrument capacity were most clearly visible in the economic and financial domains. Sanctions advocacy, though politically cost-bearing and strategically consistent, was exercised through EU multilateral mechanisms rather than through autonomous bilateral instruments whose design Poland could fully control. Trade adjustment measures, including restrictions on Ukrainian agricultural imports, generated bilateral friction with Kyiv and complicated the narrative of unconditional solidarity that Warsaw sought to project, revealing the structural tension between the domestic political imperatives of agricultural constituency management and the diplomatic requirements of a partnership premised on comprehensive support ^[11]. Reconstruction engagement was declared at a level of political ambition that was not, across the period under review, matched by the mobilisation of financial instruments commensurate with those commitments — a gap that reflected both the constraints of Poland's fiscal capacity and the structural challenge facing middle powers whose policy ambitions outpace their resource base. These limitations did not fundamentally undermine Poland's effectiveness in the security and diplomatic domains, but they placed ceiling effects on Warsaw's aspiration to assume a leadership role in the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine analogous to that assumed by larger member states with substantially greater financial mobilisation capacity.

The outcomes assessment presented in the third chapter produced a differentiated evaluation whose principal findings merit recapitulation. In the security domain, Poland's sustained advocacy for enhanced NATO presence on the eastern flank yielded measurable improvements in deterrence architecture — the establishment of permanent Allied force levels in Poland, the progressive strengthening of air defence and missile defence infrastructure, and the institutionalisation of planning frameworks that acknowledged the military geography of the eastern flank in ways that pre-2022 Alliance posture had conspicuously avoided ^[6]. These outcomes were not solely attributable to Polish initiative, but the process-tracing methodology employed in this study identified consistent Polish advocacy as a preceding and enabling condition for Allied decisions in this domain, supporting the attribution of meaningful causal influence to Warsaw's diplomatic strategy. The maintenance of Alliance cohesion in the face of asymmetric burden-sharing concerns, political pressures from within the Alliance, and the persistent uncertainty regarding the duration and outcome of the conflict was itself an outcome whose significance should not be understated, representing the collective organisational achievement within which Polish bilateral contributions were embedded.

In the political and multilateral domain, outcomes were characterised as substantially positive but subject to important qualifications. The granting of EU candidate status to Ukraine in June 2022 and the opening of accession negotiations in 2024 represented outcomes that aligned with core Polish objectives and to which Polish advocacy made a documented contribution. The maintenance of broad EU consensus on sanctions, financial assistance, and the political framing of the conflict as a contest between European values and authoritarian aggression — a framing that Poland had promoted from the earliest stages of its Eastern policy engagement — was sustained through a period of considerable internal stress within Union institutions. Against these achievements, the persistence of unresolved tensions in the bilateral relationship between Warsaw and Kyiv — most consequentially the Volhynia historical memory dispute, which periodically disrupted diplomatic communication and complicated Polish domestic political management of eastern policy — stood as a reminder that solidarity in the face of immediate threat does not dissolve the deeper historical sediment that conditions long-term bilateral relationships ^[4]. The instrumentalisation of historical grievance by domestic political actors in both Poland and Ukraine complicated what might otherwise have been a more straightforward strategic partnership, and the management of this tension constituted one of the most demanding challenges of Polish foreign policy throughout the period under review.

The role of domestic political constraints as a structuring variable in Polish Eastern policy emerged as a finding of broader theoretical significance. The observation that domestic political cohesion on core foreign policy objectives functions as a prerequisite for the sustained external influence of middle powers within multilateral alliances was supported by the Polish case with considerable analytical force. Where such cohesion was maintained — as in the domain of military assistance, NATO advocacy, and EU sanctions frameworks — Polish policy capacity was leveraged effectively and its contribution to multilateral outcomes was substantial. Where cohesion broke down — in the management of agricultural trade restrictions, the handling of refugee benefit policy, and the political mobilisation of historical memory claims — the consequences extended beyond the bilateral relationship to constrain Polish diplomatic credibility and to reinforce perceptions of instrumental inconsistency that complicated Warsaw's claim to a leadership role in European Eastern policy. The implications of this finding are not merely descriptive; they suggest that the institutional mechanisms through which core security commitments are insulated from partisan disruption — whether through parliamentary procedure, cross-party frameworks, or cultivated elite consensus — represent investments in foreign policy effectiveness whose value is demonstrable and whose absence carries measurable costs.

Several dimensions of the topic examined in this study remain insufficiently explored and constitute the most productive directions for future scholarly inquiry. The assessment of Poland's specific contribution to multilateral outcomes is inevitably constrained by the methodological limitations inherent in the attribution of influence within coalition settings, and more detailed archival research — as primary source documentation from the period becomes progressively available — would permit the refinement of causal claims that this study has necessarily advanced on the basis of the sources available at the time of writing. The long-term economic consequences of Poland's Eastern policy engagement, including the fiscal implications of refugee integration, the structural adjustments in bilateral trade relationships, and the prospective returns of reconstruction engagement, constitute a domain whose full assessment will only become possible as the post-war economic adjustment process unfolds, and whose examination would substantially enrich the understanding of how foreign policy choices distribute costs and benefits across domestic constituencies over medium and long time horizons. The comparative dimension — systematic examination of how other middle powers in Central and Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Baltic states, calibrated their Eastern policy responses to the same external stimulus — would permit the identification of the degree to which Poland's experience reflects structural features common to the region or idiosyncratic characteristics specific to its size, historical consciousness, and institutional configuration ^[5]. Finally, the domestic political dimension of Eastern policy management — specifically the mechanisms through which historical memory is mobilised as a political resource in democratic systems navigating complex external partnerships — merits examination through the conceptual lenses of comparative politics and political psychology as well as those of Foreign Policy Analysis.

The conclusion to which this study arrives is neither celebratory nor dismissive of Poland's Eastern policy record in the period following February 2022. What is warranted, on the basis of the evidence assembled and the analytical framework applied, is a carefully differentiated assessment: substantial achievement in the security and diplomatic domains, constrained performance in the economic and financial instruments, and a bilateral relationship with Ukraine that, despite the extraordinary solidarity demonstrated in the crucible of existential crisis, retained unresolved tensions whose management will constitute the central challenge of Polish foreign policy in the years following the cessation of active hostilities. Poland's foreign policy establishment demonstrated, across this period, that a middle power with limited resource base but strong historical consciousness, geopolitical clarity, and institutional leverage can exercise influence significantly disproportionate to its formal weight within multilateral structures — provided that domestic political conditions permit the sustained deployment of that influence in coherent and credible ways. The lessons of this period, for Polish foreign policy and for the broader study of middle power statecraft in crisis conditions, are consequently of enduring analytical value, regardless of how the profound uncertainties that remain — regarding the war's resolution, Ukraine's institutional trajectory, and the future of the Euro-Atlantic security order — are eventually resolved by the forces of history that this study has sought, within its necessarily limited scope, to examine and to understand.