This Guardian piece by Professor Robert Service about NATO/Russia has been noted in Poland.

One sentence caught my eye (highlighted):

What is more, Russians, from their present and future Presidents downwards, can see no justification for the US to turn states on Russia’s borders into engines of American regional power. Trouble last came to Russia from Poland when the Germans were in occupation of Warsaw. Now George Bush wants to place advanced military technology on Polish soil, expecting Russians to accept his word that he has only Iran in his sights.

Blimey! How idiotic we all have been to think that it was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which brought ‘trouble’ from Russia (and indeed Germany) into Poland.

The rest of the article is fair enough, albeit perhaps leaning a bit far in urging the West to pay attention to "genuine Russian concerns" without describing how far Russia should pay attention to ours.

A great expert on this part of the world yesterday gave me an interesting point. He said that the Russian/Soviet empire had not mainly oppressed individual nations (ie Ukrainians) as such, in the way that it might be argued the English at different times had oppressed the Irish. [Chechens? – Ed]. Rather everyone across that vast area, Russians included, had been oppressed by rule from Moscow. Hence many ethnic Ukrainians today were not particularly ‘anti-Russia’ or ‘anti-Russian’, and why they might not relish being asked to choose between joining NATO and some sort of historic solidarity with Russia.

This (he argued) also helped show why the Russian Duma had so strongly rejected the argument that the famines in Ukraine were an act of genocide (ie an act aimed at Ukrainians or other nationalities specifically) – Stalin was an Equal Opportunities tyrant and had made many other national communities in the areas concerned starve to death too.

There is something in this, of course. It is all fearsomely complicated. I recall that when Ukraine and Russia were arguing over the fate of the former Soviet Black Sea Fleet in the early 1990s, there were said to be more ethnic Ukrainians on the Russian/Moscow side of the negotiating table than on the Ukrainian side.

These vast issues rumble on down the decades.

But let’s at least agree that WW2 and all the ‘trouble’ it caused Russia and the rest of us did not emanate from Poland but was started by Hitler and Stalin cutting Europe down the middle and grabbing what they could?

And that if free European countries opt to cooperate militarily with the United States and with each other to deal with real security threats, they are not thereby abruptly transformed into helpless unthinking ‘engines of American regional power’?