Stuart Dowell

Political editor at TVP World. Polish and CEE politics. Commentary, analysis & opinion. Warsaw-based. Views strictly my own.

[Stuart Dowell @StuartDowell_]

A shocking part of the Trump–Russia "peace plan" isn’t just what it does to Ukraine. It is what it quietly does to Poland.

Buried in point 9 is a sentence that looks harmless: European fighters will be stationed in Poland.

On paper, that sounds fine. In practice, though, it looks like Washington and Moscow have agreed over Poland’s head to limit the presence of foreign forces on Polish soil, including US forces, and to put a ceiling on NATO air power over the region.

If “European fighters” are explicitly named, the obvious Russian reading is simple: no US jets in Poland. And if Russia is co-signing language that defines who and what can be stationed here, it is also a de facto say over NATO air policing in the Baltics and the rest of the eastern flank.

That is not “Pax Americana.” That is the US accepting a Russian veto over the security posture of front-line allies.

For Polish politics this hits a very specific nerve. For years, Jarosław Kaczyński and now President Karol Nawrocki have built their doctrine on one core idea: forget Brussels, forget Berlin, our security rests on a direct, privileged relationship with Washington.

For a country that has spent a decade telling itself that American power is the only real guarantee, that should be a brutal wake-up call.

[Stuart Dowell @StuartDowell_]

…Grzegorz Braun's breakaway radical movement is eating into the bloc's combined support.

Nawrocki has made Poland harder to govern but he has not yet made a clear path for the right to take back.

https://t.co/aXTuw9xFYC

[Stuart Dowell @StuartDowell_]

Karol Nawrocki on the year since he was elected president has built exactly the presidency he intended. The problem is that it has not delivered what he intended. 1/

[Stuart Dowell @StuartDowell_]

And the Polish right, rather than consolidating around the presidency, is fragmenting: Law and Justice has fallen to a fourteen-year polling low, its two internal factions are barely holding together, Confederation's two component parties are fighting over candidate lists, and…

[Stuart Dowell @StuartDowell_]

Pushing to remove Zelenskyy’s Order of the White Eagle allows him to outflank Donald Tusk’s government, and stop Confederation pulling the patriotic right away from him.

https://t.co/qBRpbWBBAa

[Stuart Dowell @StuartDowell_]

Zelenskyy named a Ukrainian military unit after the “Heroes of the UPA” this week because he is at his weakest point since Russia’s full-scale invasion, and is part of a conscious policy of placing today’s war heroes inside a longer Ukrainian independence canon. 1/👇

[Stuart Dowell @StuartDowell_]

He also knows that Poland cannot afford a Ukrainian defeat. That limits how far Polish anger can go.

On the Polish side, Karol Nawrocki also has clear incentives. As a former head of the Institute of National Remembrance, memory politics is his natural terrain.

[Stuart Dowell @StuartDowell_]

https://t.co/yhOxNM1r6X

[Stuart Dowell @StuartDowell_]

Keep calm and sign another treaty. This increasingly looks like Europe’s security doctrine in a new age of strategic uncertainty, where governments no longer assume old guarantees, alliances and institutions will automatically hold. 1/ 🧵

[Stuart Dowell @StuartDowell_]

Bilateral treaties are becoming the way states hedge in an uncertain world. NATO remains the foundation. The EU provides money, regulation and industrial tools. But when fundamental security interests are at stake, national governments are building the hard links themselves.