WARSAW, Poland — Radoslaw
Sikorski has been at the center of the Ukrainian revolution since before it
began. As one of two European foreign ministers to assiduously pursue an EU association agreement with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych — whose
rejection of it prompted the Euromaidan protests that led to Yanukovych’s flight from
Kiev and ouster from power — Sikorski is well aware of the stakes in keeping
Ukraine politically and economically stable, particularly before its May 25 presidential election.

This
translates into keeping Russian tanks out of Ukraine and Moscow-choreographed
militias from rendering the country’s east too dysfunctional to govern or poll. “I was
pleased by the news out of Kiev this morning that the barricades there are
being dismantled,” the Polish foreign minister told Foreign
Policy on April 23 at the Polish Foreign Ministry in central Warsaw.
“This means that the Ukrainian authorities have managed to build a consensus in
the capital for normalizing government functions and the life of the city. And,
yes, we hope that Russia will do the same with respect to the people over which
she has influence.”

A former
student activist who had to rely on foreign democracy in extremity — he was
granted asylum in Britain after martial law was declared in Poland in 1981, and he was educated at Oxford University — Sikorski was
discussing the fitful implementation of yet another diplomatic agreement signed
this year in Geneva, the one among the United States, the European
Union, Russia, and Ukraine to “de-escalate tensions” in Ukraine
“and restore security for all citizens,” as the countries put it in a joint statement. Yet the people whom Russia influences are the armed separatists in
eastern and southern Ukraine, who not only haven’t disarmed or abandoned seized
governmental buildings in Lugansk, Donetsk, and Slavyansk — a clear violation of the Geneva agreement — but may imminently be receiving
conventional military support from the some 50,000 Russian troops amassed at
Ukraine’s borders. “It will probably be called an intervention by ‘peacekeeping’ troops or a
‘humanitarian intervention,'” the foreign minister explained.

This was mere
hours after his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, for the first time intimated
that his government might send its tens of thousands of troops amassed at the
border into mainland Ukraine in the event that Moscow’s “legitimate interests” were “attacked.” Lavrov
ominously cited South Ossetia and Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia as a precedent; a
day later, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, said
that, to justify a second invasion of Ukrainian territory, Moscow might invoke
Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which relates to a country’s right of self-defense.

“It’s difficult
to fathom Russian intentions, which is itself probably a Russian success,
because various options have been mentioned,” Sikorski said. One mooted
compromise is a federalized government for post-Yanukovych Ukraine, which
really means a decentralized one that would empower the eastern regions at the
expense of Kiev. In this respect, Sikorski thinks that Moscow could do with a
taste of its own medicine. He recommends the Polish prescription: “In Poland’s
case, [decentralization] means that regions take a part of income tax and have
local and regional taxes and large autonomous budgets. My hometown of Bydgoszcz, a city of
just over 400,000, has a budget bigger than the Foreign Ministry.”

Because
Russian-Ukrainian interests are guided by mutual interests — and mutual limitations
— Sikorski hopes that the Kremlin will behave logically and not
self-destructively: “Ukraine and Russia have important business together. They
depend on each other for the transit of Russian gas to Europe. Crimea, now
under Russian control, depends on water and gas and electricity from Ukraine.
The two countries’ armaments industries are interlinked.” (Russia depends on
Ukrainian manufacturing for everything from its combat helicopters and fighter
jets to intercontinental ballistic missiles.)

Sikorski is
seen as a possible successor to Catherine Ashton, the EU’s
foreign-policy chief, when her five-year term ends this year. But has he
been pleased with how Brussels has responded to the Ukraine crisis as compared
with Washington, which has passed more stringent sanctions against Russia and has
taken a generally more combative diplomatic line? It would be an unfair
comparison, he said, to expect the European Union to act like the United States
— or Russia, for that matter. “We will never be like that because we’re a
confederation of 28 states. Also, we do not have the kinds of instruments that
the U.S. or Russia have, like a powerful intelligence apparatus or a deployable
army.”

Since the
crisis kicked off, many in the American media — myself included —
have seized upon not only Europe’s energy dependence on Russia but also the
unending Volga of rubles that yearly flow into European banks, properties, and
trading firms as reasons that Brussels has been more skittish than Washington
about confronting the Kremlin. To Sikorski, the accusation is hypocritical:
“You can continue to talk about Russian money in London or among European NGOs,
but the last time I was in Washington, I noticed that American think tanks, law
firms, and PR firms were not that reluctant to [take Russian money],” he said,
laughing, though, unsurprisingly, he declined to name names.

As for
Poland’s relationship with Russia, it’s complicated. For one thing, the two countries’ economies are interlinked almost to the degree that Russia’s and Germany’s are.
Poland trades close to $38 billion annually with Russia, making it its second-biggest source of imports. Poland is also the only country inside the European Union to share a border with
both Russia and Ukraine. Yet whereas Berlin is seen to be Europe’s squish when
it comes to confronting Moscow with rhetoric and financial penalties, Warsaw is
quicker to apprehend a continental security threat gathering. No doubt this
owes to the fact that Poland technically ceased to exist as a country after the
joint invasion and occupation by Nazi and Soviet forces in 1939. Its grim
history as one of the “bloodlands” of the 20th century has foreclosed on any optimistic gloss on
neo-imperial ambitions.

“We tried to
normalize our relations with Russia, and it succeeded to some extent,” he said,
adding that Poland backed Russia’s application to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example.* Warsaw
established a local border-traffic agreement between its provinces and Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, and “millions of people on
both sides are taking advantage of visa-free
travel,” he said. “[Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin came to the 70th anniversary of the start of
the Second World War, which might seem like a routine thing, but it was a new
departure for Russia to acknowledge that the Second World War started in Poland
rather than with the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union.” Another milestone was Putin’s 2010 visit to the Katyn memorial, which honors the more than 20,000 Polish
military officers and civilians who were massacred by the NKVD (the forerunner of
the KGB) 70 years earlier; Stalin placed the blame on the Nazis. This visit,
the first by a Russian leader, occurred three days before a plane carrying 96 people, including Polish President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of
government and military officials, crashed in Smolensk, Russia, killing everyone on board. It was a Polish national
tragedy deemed “the second disaster after Katyn” by Solidarity dissident and
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Walesa.

“Then things
started going not so well,” Sikorski said, “when they refused to return the
wreckage of our Air Force One to us.” The pretext is that Russia is still
conducting its investigations, he said, but “the reality is that they’re holding it hostage
until our prosecution services clear their ground-control personnel from any
guilt. This is of course my supposition.”

A day before
Sikorski sat down with Foreign Policy,
150 U.S. paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team arrived in Poland for military exercises (450 more soon followed). Clearly a symbol of deterrence against Russian revanchism, this
garrison doesn’t constitute “big news,” according to Sikorski. It is the least
that NATO and the United States could do for a fellow 15-year NATO member, which
takes its own national defense extremely seriously. Poland’s defense spending,
mandated by a law to be around 2 percent of GDP. Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski’s eponymous security doctrine envisions an end to expeditionary Polish wars in favor of homeland
defense, fortifying Poland in the event of an invasion of its territory by
guess-who. And though George W. Bush was derided at home for referring to
Poland’s participation in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, it is no trivial or
laughable thing that this small country dispatched its men and women into
brutal combat zones in both Afghanistan and Iraq. “Now we feel that it’s
payback time,” Sikorski said. “NATO needs to go back to basics because whereas
conflict inside the European Union has become unthinkable, conflict on the
periphery of the European Union is not just all too thinkable but is rather a
very concerning reality.” 

Prior to
these military exercises, the only NATO institution in Poland was “really just a house
with some computers in it,” he said, and “literally a dozen guys at an airfield enabling occasional exercises.” What’s the point of admitting new NATO
members, Sikorski asks, if they’re not to be actually fortified militarily?

Yet it isn’t
only Russian hard power that has Poland’s top diplomat concerned. In 2012, he
delivered a speech near his alma mater of Oxford in which he essentially begged Britain to
abandon its Euroskeptic attitudes and not even think about withdrawing from the European Union. “Do not underestimate our determination not to return to the politics of
the 20th century,” he told his audience on that occasion. “You were not occupied. Most of us
on the continent were. We will do almost anything to prevent that from
happening again.” He also said that
Poland did not want to be considered a “buffer” between the democratic West
and the authoritarian East, but regarded as a full-fledged political and
economic partner with Germany and France.

This was
especially powerful stuff coming from a center-right European minister who was,
at least for a spell at the end of the Cold War, a habitué of the conservative
British establishment. At Oxford, Sikorski was a member of the Bullingdon Club dining society, recent
members of which have included British Prime Minister David Cameron and London
Mayor Boris Johnson, whose populist dispatches from Brussels for the Daily
Telegraph were once seen as Euroskepticism’s high art form. But, contrary to Tory conventional wisdom
now, Sikorski thinks that Britain’s greatness is not reduced by its participation
in supranational institutions; rather, it is enhanced by such participation. As
he observed in 2012, London would simply not be taken as seriously as it is
abroad — particularly in Washington — if it backed out of the European Union
and thereby lost its influence on multilateral policymaking and on the
continent as a whole. Now, Sikorski says with a smile, his old host nation
should filter his minatory comments through its internal debate about
the possible dissolution of the United Kingdom. “I was making the same argument
about the EU as the U.K. government makes about remaining in Scotland: Together we’re stronger.”

In a way, Putin may have just helped make the Pole’s case for him. Russia’s behavior in Ukraine may have alarmed establishment
politicians in Westminster, but it has
impressed outliers seeking to shape British foreign policy. Nigel
Farage, the clownish leader of the U.K. Independence Party, has said that of all leaders, he most admires Putin. Scottish National Party First Minister Alex Salmond, who would determine Scotland’s foreign policy if it
did secede from Britain, has similarly praised Putin for “restor[ing] a
substantial part of Russian pride.” Elsewhere, and further to their right,
other European political parties such as Hungary’s Jobbik, France’s National
Front, and Austria’s Freedom Party, sent “observers” to monitor March’s
so-called “referendum” on Crimea’s incorporation into the Russian Federation.

“We’re very concerned by this alliance — and not just its practical
expressions but, above all, by its ideological affinities,” Sikorski said of
the reactionary embrace of Russian belligerence. He went on to say that those
who admire Putin’s forceful actions are similar to those who favor the
dismantlement of the European Union: They both “tend to be suspicious of
national minorities in their own countries and tend to be culturally
very conservative.” Needless to add, in the midst of
economic uncertainty, demagogic assertions of traditional social and religious
values and great-power nostalgia are catalysts for world wars and
totalitarianism. Russia also employs what Sikorski calls a “formidable
propaganda apparatus that has reached millions of homes, both in Western Europe
and the United States.” Indeed, that
apparatus now appeals to many non-Russians: Witness the success of the English-language channel RT in North America.

That Putin might find solace in a kind of Fascist International may prove
to be the one thing that ultimately unites opposition against him. “I don’t
think most Europeans would accept the return to the politics of the 20th
century,” Sikorski said, echoing a line from his aforementioned Oxford speech.
“So I think Mr. Putin has made the case for us for an EU that is more capable
of stabilizing its neighborhood, both in terms of foreign policy, but also
neighborhood policy and eventually defense policy.” As such, Sikorski thinks
that the continent faces two hard tasks ahead. First, it must stop
expecting or demanding the United States to assume control of all its manifold problems. He
points to the European Union’s leadership on Mali and the Central African Republic as
examples. Second, the countries
of the former Soviet Union must finish what they started in 1991, which is
arguably what Ukraine is trying to do today.

“We were always somewhat skeptical of this
end-of-history nirvana proposed by some,” he said. “But now I think it should
be appreciated that the project of making Europe ‘whole and free’ truly isn’t finished and that Europe cannot be ticked off
as ‘mission accomplished.'”

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Photo by GEORGES GOBET/AFP/Getty Images