“It is not we, the West, who should fear a clash with Putin, but the other way around,” Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said.
A war between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and NATO would end with Moscow’s “inevitable defeat,” Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said Thursday.
"It is not we, the West, who should fear a clash with Putin, but the other way around,” Sikorski said during a speech to the Sejm, the lower house of Poland’s parliament. “It is worth reminding about this, not to increase the sense of threat in the Russians, because NATO is a defensive pact, but to show that an attack by Russia on any of the members of the Alliance would end in its [Russia’s] inevitable defeat.”
Sikorski, who was laying out Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s vision for the new government’s foreign policy, said Russia’s military and economic potential “pales in comparison to that of the West,” as NATO has three times as many military personnel, three times the aerial resources and four times as many ships as Russia.
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Western allies and top military officials have become increasingly worried about a potential spillover of violence from Putin’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine — as the Russian leader continues to issue veiled nuclear threats toward the West and stashes atomic weapons in Belarus, which borders NATO members Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
While Brexit definitely was a massive win for Russia, I disagree with the characterisation of it meaning the EU can no longer rely on the UK in times of conflict. The UK has been pretty consistent with wanting to increase security cooperation with the EU since then (sadly the only thing they do seem to want to cooperate on) and have done things like forge mutual defense treaties with Finland and Sweden when the decision to join NATO was made but not yet formalised.