Poland’s Rzeczpospolita reported on Monday that their country has already begun extraditing human traffickers back to Ukraine and could potentially widen the net to include draft dodgers too if Kiev issues international warrants for their arrest. The second-mentioned possible dimension of these two’s cooperation could serve to reset their relations after they deteriorated over the past month as detailed here. This scenario isn’t far-fetched either for the reasons that will now be explained.
The Polish and Ukrainian leaderships have a shared interest in perpetuating the NATO-Russian proxy war despite their growing disagreements on a number of issues, but this requires Kiev having enough troops to at least hold the front lines and prevent a potential Russian breakthrough. It’s running dangerously low though due to the over 40,000 casualties that it reportedly suffered during this summer’s failed counteroffensive. In order to compensate for this, Kiev is now cracking down on draft dodgers.
Last month, Zelensky fired the heads of all military conscription offices in the country on the pretext that they were involved in these activities prior to ordering that all military draft exemptions be investigated to ensure they’re for valid conditions. Just this weekend, he then decreed that a raft of mild conditions will now longer exempt one from their duty, while at the same time ordering all nurses, pharmacists, and other medical services personnel (most of whom are women) to register with the military authorities.
The last-mentioned occurred on the same day that Zelensky fired his Defense Minister, which this analysis here argued was because he finally agreed to follow the Pentagon’s advice for waging this proxy war in exchange for the US’ liberal-globalist policymaking faction supporting his re-election bid. These two moves came after last week’s drone attacks against Pskov that were assessed here to be desperate attempts by Zelensky, that aforesaid faction, Poland, and the Baltic States to provoke a larger conflict.
Everything is therefore moving in the direction of perpetuating the proxy war unless Russia either achieves a breakthrough along the front or a serious incident takes place in Asia to force the US to reprioritize China’s containment. The second scenario for offsetting the conflict’s newly recalibrated trajectory is beyond Poland and Ukraine’s control, but they can work together to prevent the first by Warsaw extraditing whatever draft dodgers Kiev might soon issue an international arrest warrant for.
Not only would the Polish leadership help keep the conflict going by replenishing the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, but it could leverage this cooperation to push an informal “ceasefire” in their escalating tit-for-tat over the past month that grew out of their grain disagreement but since widened. Furthermore, the ruling party could appeal to its conservative-nationalist base ahead of the 15 October elections by kicking thousands of military-aged male Ukrainian refugees out of the country by then.
Considering all that, it’s very likely that Kiev will soon issue international arrest warrants for thousands of its draft-dodging citizens residing in Poland, which Warsaw will swiftly comply with. This could help reset their relations or at least lead to them eschewing further verbal attacks against the other. Even if they continue their tit-for-tat, their shared interest in perpetuating the proxy war would still be advanced, which is why they’re expected to cooperate on this military-strategic issue in the coming future.
