Ukraine still remains abandoned by Western Europe.

Aug 2025 : The veto by Poland’s new president, Karol Nawrocki, of a bill extending financial support for Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war, and potentially ending Polish funding for Ukraine’s Starlink internet service might be an unprecedented move, it might also be an early sign of a weakening of the Eastern European resolve to bring about a Russian defeat in Ukraine.

However, Hungary and the brazenness with which Viktor Orbán has taken Russia’s side in the war—doubling down on energy purchases from Russia in the wake of the invasion, blocking aid to Ukraine and new sanctions packages, and even dispatching spies to Transcarpathia to see how the local population would respond to being incorporated back into Greater Hungary. Slovakia’s record has been similarly disappointing. Among the first to transfer fighter jets and provide air defence systems to Ukraine, the country’s current government is serving as Russia’s fifth column in the European Union.

There is no question that, as a regional power with an inherent distrust of Russia, Poland finds itself in a different category from Hungary and Slovakia. Yet, that makes Nawrocki’s veto and its broader context even more concerning. A wavering or a division in Poland on an issue as fundamental as Ukraine will reverberate far beyond the country’s borders, and will risk bringing out the worst in leaders across the region. In Warsaw, Vilnius, and Prague, leaders typically await and act on cues coming from Washington.

Recall that in the first round of the election, the winning candidate of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) was flanked on his right by two candidates who jointly earned around 20 percent of the vote. Neither of them, Sławomir Mentzen nor Grzegorz Braun, has demonstrated that they understand what is at stake in Ukraine. Mentzen seems too preoccupied with fighting Brussels to care about Russia. Braun—in addition to his anti-Semitism—is virulently anti-Ukrainian, keen to repeat Russian talking points about “banderites” in Kyiv.

What was keeping PiS from indulging the undercurrent of anti-Ukrainian populism, further exacerbated by the pressure Ukrainian refugees put on public services, was the figure of the party’s leader, Jarosław Kaczyński. As prime minister, Kaczyński lost his twin brother, Lech, then Poland’s president, in an airplane crash in Russia in 2010—in what some in Poland continue to believe was not an accident.

Yet, as Kaczyński’s grip on his party weakens, so do the antibodies against bad geopolitical thinking on the Polish right. Nawrocki, moreover, is far from being a skilled, strategic political operator. The former president, Andrzej Duda, also a PiS man fought frequently with the centrist government, but he was also able to rise above partisan politics during critical moments, such as during a joint visit to Washington with his nemesis, Donald Tusk, the prime minister.

Duda also seemed effective at moving the needle with Trump and his team, particularly ahead of the vote on the most recent supplemental bill on Ukraine. Poland’s absence, resulting from a stand-off between the president’s office and the government, was noticeable during the recent visit of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders to the White House, in an effort to steer the peace negotiations.

Team Maverick