Poland's Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski (from Donald Tusk's center-right Civic Coalition), met with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Warsaw on Thursday, September 12, on Blinken's return from Kyiv, before visiting the Ukrainian capital himself. In an interview with Le Monde, He justified the need to allow Ukraine to strike military targets on Russian territory with long-range missiles.
Your attitude on this depends on what your objective is. If the objective is for Ukraine to win, by which I mean Ukraine recovers control of its international border, or is your objective for Ukraine to endure? The trouble with this second strategy is that Ukraine's capacity to endure is not infinite.
The Russian invasion of February 2022 was condemned by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly by one of the largest majorities in its history. It means that the victim of aggression has a right to defend herself, also on the territory of the aggressor. That vote establishes not only the right of the victim, but also the obligation of the international community to take countermeasures to restore the state of respect for international law, which Vladimir Putin flagrantly violated.
I understand the argument of those who say that we need to control the temperature of this conflict. But I am concerned when we are constantly being asked about Putin's redlines, and I have not yet been asked by any journalist about OUR red lines.
Poland is the only country in the EU that is a neighbor of both Russia and Ukraine and we have a pretty obvious redline that our citizens should not be killed by Russian ordnance and we have Russian missiles and drones flying into our airspace, because the Russians lost control of them and I fear that sooner or later, one of them may harm our people or property. And I don't see why Ukraine should not be in a position to take down the bombers that launched those missiles or the airfields from which they are launched. This seems to be a completely legitimate military target.
Well, Ukraine is asking us to do so. And our Constitution says that the first duty of the Polish army is to protect Poland's borders, which should also apply to airspace. When a missile comes within range of Polish airspace, my personal view is that we have the right to self-defense. Those missiles have absolutely no business being there.
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