As someone who currently lives in Poland, I hope this will be a wakeup call for Western Europe, which has so far been living a medieval dream of "the aggressor is far away and there are countries between us and the aggressor, so we can carry on as usual". That used to be a valid assumption several hundred years ago, but now no longer holds.
I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger. And I really hope the EU will stop funding the Russian military machine. Not everyone realizes this, but just in October 2025, the five largest EU importers of Russian fossil fuels paid Russia nearly 1 billion €. ONE BILLION EUR per month. Compare that to the military aid we are sending to Ukraine. (source: https://energyandcleanair.org/october-2025-monthly-analysis-...)
> so far been living a medieval dream of "the aggressor is far away
As a Western European, I want to give you a different perspective on this. For us, everything behind the iron curtain was Soviet. Then the curtain fell and we saw all these countries like yours, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Baltic states, etc, transition into democracies. While doing that, they lifted their welfare significantly. We had no reason to think Russia wouldn't do the same (why wouldn't they?).
Plus, our neighbor Germany was not the nicest kid on the block in the past, and we also saw them transition into a normal, peace loving nation. So in the end, we had no reason to believe why Russia would stick to something that actually hurts their own lives.
It was very naive, I agree. But only recently, we realized that Russia has no intention to follow the path that central and eastern Europe took.
And yes, I'm ashamed of how little support Europe is giving. I'm sending money out of my own pocket, because I hope every bit helps.
As I understand, if Europe stopped buying Russian natural gas, it would have to buy it at much higher prices elsewhere, which would raise things like electricity cost, logistics cost, which in turn might make voters unhappy and vote out the current government. That's the weakness of EU, it's made of many countries which put their interests first and have a democratic system.
Furthermore, there are suspicious things happening, like appointing former German chancellor for a Gazprom directors board [1]. Was he appointed for his exceptional skills and expertise, or for some other reason?
For comparison, Russia has no such problems; due to centralization and localization of economy, the prices and rouble value are kept under control; due to more authoritarian style of governing, nobody complains when utility bill raises every year, and sometimes twice a year. Russia also had tax increases for couple years straight, and again, nobody complained, unlike Europeans which tend to change the government every time they become unhappy with something. And obviously, West has no means to bribe or corrupt Russian leadership or finance any political movements.
It disheartens me to see how Polish opinion on the EU has been systematically dismantled, not sure if it's mostly Russian propaganda but EU skepticism is growing a lot over there, given that Poland is right at the footsteps of Russia it does not bode well it's starting to turn on the EU...
Guess who else is very much interested in that happening.....
"Leaked files ‘show US wants to persuade four nations to leave EU’
The countries seen as targets to follow Brexit are Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland, according to leaked details of the US national security strategy"
https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/us-meg...
Well, this was the case decades ago, too, just few people paid attention. The US made sure their interests are always put before Polish interests, and these were regularly reported by the US embassy in Warsaw. See e.g.:[0]
"Rozanski went on
to explain that Polish food products are viewed in the EU as
healthy and natural, and are competitive in their current
state. Use of GM seeds could threaten this perception, and
thus Poland's place in the market. When Spirnak and Embassy
Agricultural Counselor noted that such an approach would be
of great concern to the U.S. and would be contrary to EU as
well as WTO commitments, Rozanski backed off and said that
Poland must comply with EU and international commitments
(Note: Rozanski softened this message further at a subsequent
meeting that Agricultural Counselor attended)."
The bright point is, since it's more or less clear that the US basically stopped caring much about Europe militarily, the "great concern to the U.S." cited above is not that relevant. Trump basically destroyed most of the soft power the USA had over Europe.
>>I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger
As a Pole, I think the nation as a whole doesn't recognize that we are already at war. By any estimate, Russia already uses thousands of people online to post false information about both the war and Ukrainians in Poland, trying to incite hatred towards them so that Polish support for them goes down, and so far it has been working. Just go to a comment section on any news article or(if you're brave) Facebook, it's dare I say infested with brand new accounts whose entire posting history is just "get those ukrainian vermins out of this country" or the variations of. The governments office that was meant to investigate and combat this had....2 employees until very recently. Our response to this is not just inadequate, we are literally being "attacked"(not in a physical sense) by another nation and we do very little about it. And it appears to be working too - outright xenophobia and actual physical violence against Ukrainians is up on the raise in Poland, and political stance of "you know maybe Putin isn't such a bad guy" is coming out of the fringes and entering public conversation too. For a country such as Poland which has suffered first hand at the hands of Russians, this is an insane position to take.
The Netherlands (population 18 million) has an annual budget of 350 billion.
Russia is in reality a poor country.
The strategy of the Netherlands is to just keep the war going by sending money. The reality is that we're actually WINNING but some people don't want that.
I definitely hope it will, but you know, the further remote from Russia the safer and less interested they can afford to be. Because the cyber war is here, there's lots of messages with "Russia is not my enemy" on the Romanian Facebook as well. This even when Putty's goon just said they're at war with Europe.
I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger. And I really hope the EU will stop funding the Russian military machine. Not everyone realizes this, but just in October 2025, the five largest EU importers of Russian fossil fuels paid Russia nearly 1 billion €. ONE BILLION EUR per month. Compare that to the military aid we are sending to Ukraine. (source: https://energyandcleanair.org/october-2025-monthly-analysis-...)