OCTOBER 19, 2026 – Before my initial sojourn in Poland, I was cognizant of Polish antipathy toward Germany as a result of the Nazi Blitzkrieg and brutal occupation during WW II, but not until my intense travels there in late summer/early fall of 1981 did I learn of the Poles’ visceral hatred of the Russians. My lesson in this regard was condensed in a conversation I had in the compartment I shared with a Polish army officer army aboard a night train from Krakow to Warsaw. The country was in the throes of revolution against the Soviet-imposed Communist regime, and the world anticipated that one day soon, the Soviet Union would invade to put down the rebellion.
“Do you speak any English?” I asked of him slowly.
“Yes, a little,” came his reply.
Hopeful of a more substantive conversation, I exchanged small talk with him to test his grasp of my language. To my pleasant surprise (at that time in Poland, English was not widely spoken), his facility was more than adequate: I learned that he was a career army officer in the tank corps, a Communist Party member and two years older than I was at the time.
“Tell me,” I said. “If the Russians invade, what will you personally do? I mean, you’re a Communist. You’re a professional soldier in the army of a key ally of the USSR, but you are also a Pole, surely with loyalties to your country. Which side will you be on?”
A smile stretched across the officer’s face. Without missing a beat, he said, “Let me put it this way: It is my duty to fight Germans . . . but it is my pleasure to fight Russians.” With that simple sentence, the Pole told me everything that could be learned from a panel of foreign affairs experts and military strategists. The Soviets, I concluded confidently, had a huge problem on their hands.
That encounter informs my view of Putin’s war against Ukraine, Poland’s next-door neighbor to the east. Since the very beginning of the Russian onslaught, I’ve seen the conflict as most people tethered to reality see it: a boldface land grab by the modern-day Tsar Vladimir.
Apart from the brutal murder of Ukrainian people, relentless bombing of their cities and the inhumane conversion of Russians and North Koreans into cannon fodder, what’s so outlandishly disturbing is how in his relations with Putin and Zelenskyy, our very own president has committed gross diplomatic and strategic policy malpractice bordering on treason.
And yet . . . Trump has committed so many fouls, breached so many laws, defied so many court orders, imposed so many reckless and damaging tariffs, savaged so many institutions, upended so many strategic partnerships, pardoned so many felons, committed so much grift, unleashed so many brutal ICE agents, and triggered so much chaos in the Middle East, his latest offenses against Ukraine—waiver of the sanctions against Russia and taking down Ukraine’s access to Starlink—are just added effluence gushing from the vast sewer pipe of the Trump Administration. Most Americans are too fickle, too myopic, too desperate financially to care about an unprovoked forever war initiated by one far off country against another—unless, of course, it means paying more for gas. But there will come a day of reckoning for us all.
The war in Ukraine is about far more than the fate of a land thousands of miles from our shores. It’s about world order as most reasonable people would want it to be; that is, one in which the dignity of the individual is paramount and thus protected. This kind of world order requires at a minimum, that countries not be allowed to annex their neighbors by force as Putin’s Russia is attempting to do in Ukraine. If Putin is allowed to succeed—or worse, if he is encouraged to succeed, as Trump is now doing—then all bets are off.
If the most powerful nation on earth won’t stand up for world order, that order is doomed. Under such circumstances, no one will be safe from the rule of tyrants, as they move to control land, people, resources, commerce, freedom of trade and travel. Accompanying the rise of tyrants will be the collapse of reliance of former allies on the United States. They will soon bristle with arms—doubtless nuclear weapons—to fill the void abruptly and thoughtlessly created by the American bull in a china shop. The world order will devolve into world instability—and war.
This critical issue is joined with so many other to reinforce the primary exigency facing our nation: the dire need to defang and declaw Trump by a smashing mid-term Democratic victory. Ukraine is depending on it—as are the Poles; as are we ourselves.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
