Russian official claims Poland intends to ‘absorb remnants’ of Ukraine

ISTANBUL

A senior Russian official on Monday claimed that Poland intends to “absorb the remnants” of Ukraine, with the intention of reviving the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

“Warsaw elites can’t wait to see themselves taking geopolitical revenge on Russia, including reconsidering the Pereiaslav Agreement. Emboldened by the current circumstances, Poland has decided that the chance to absorb the remnants of Ukraine is to be taken now, or never,” Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, said on Twitter.

The Pereiaslav Agreement was a treaty signed in January 1654, which placed Ukrainian Cossacks, who were then rebelling against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, under the protection of the Tsardom of Russia.

Medvedev, who is also a former Russian president, claimed that the Polish are “dreaming” of the idea of “restoring the interstate union with Ukraine and revival of the underdone empire, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth,” further claiming that Warsaw draws inspiration from 400-year-old maps due to having “no intellectual powers for creating a viable image of the future.”

He went on to say that “imperial hallucinations” are pushing Polish society in this direction, adding Warsaw has not thought about the consequences of such aims, that the “fodder base of westourkaine (Western Ukraine) will run out soon enough,” and that the "Poles’ memories of living in a polyethnic state have dimmed."

“I’ll now bring up a paradoxical point. In prospect, the underdone and ugly Polish-Ukrainian configuration is, in a way, beneficial to Russia,” Medvedev said.

He also claimed that the trajectory in Warsaw will eventually force its neighbors to turn to Moscow for help and sign a new European security treaty "to contain unruly Poland."

“Polacks have miscalculated their idée fixe: it’s no longer mid-18th century. Poland is not equal to Russia and will never be,” he said.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a union state made up of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that ruled over territories encompassing modern-day Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia between the mid-16th century and late-18th century.