ANALYSIS | This is why Biden is going to Poland

Biden attends NATO emergency summit: what was expected? 5:32 (CNN) — If there’s one nation that understands Ukraine’s torment, it’s Poland, which on Friday welcomes US President Joe Biden as part of his emergency mission to bolster the country’s defenses. NATO after the brutal invasion of Russia. In the United States, Biden’s warnings that democracy is under siege by menacing autocrats may seem remote, even after former President Donald Trump’s insurrection on Capitol Hill and his attempt to steal the 2020 election. But in Poland, Ukraine’s neighbor , freedom is fresh enough to still be a novelty. In a tortured 20th-century history, the country, divided between East and West, was repeatedly conquered, ruled by foreign tyrants, and saw millions of its inhabitants purged or driven as refugees from their war-torn homes. Poland is once again on the front line of the conflict. It is on the dividing line between the NATO club states, to which it now belongs, and President Vladimir Putin’s Russian orbit, which includes another Polish neighbor, Belarus. Poland opened its borders to more than 2 million of the 3.7 million Ukrainians who fled Putin’s onslaught, and the war moved closer to its borders with a Russian attack on a base in western Ukraine earlier this month. This is how the Ukrainian-Mexican supports the emergency work in Poland 2:11 Like Ukraine, Poland lived for decades under the communist iron fist of Moscow. Like the Ukrainians, the Poles are often brave, deeply mistrustful of the Russians, and have the struggle for their freedom and sovereignty embedded in their DNA. Unlike Ukraine, one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union, Poland came to the West after decades under the umbrella of the Warsaw Pact. And in addition to being in NATO, it is a member of the European Union, although it has recently been in tension with Brussels over its own flirtations with populist nationalism. As the threat from Putin has grown in recent years, Poland has played host to rotations of US troops and planes. In February, before Putin invaded Ukraine, Poland was one of the nations to which Biden sent 3,000 troops to bolster the alliance’s eastern flank. If the war in Ukraine turns into a broader conflict between Russia and the West, a terrifying prospect, it is very likely to happen in Poland. “We think it’s the right place for (Biden) to go to be able to see troops, to be able to see humanitarian experts and to be able to meet with a frontline and very vulnerable ally,” US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said this week. week. Biden’s trip comes several weeks after Vice President Kamala Harris was in Warsaw and helped ease a disagreement between the two governments over Poland’s plan to send Soviet-era planes to Ukraine. Biden opposed the transfer, reasoning that Putin could see it as an escalation of the conflict that could create a cascade of consequences and a confrontation between the West and Russia, putting a nuclear exchange at risk. Deep ties to Washington Americans — and American presidents — are popular in Poland, a legacy of strong US support for the dissident Solidarity movement, which nurtured itself in the shipyards of the northern city of Gdansk and created some of the first cracks in Poland. the Soviet Empire, with the support of the Polish Pope, John Paul II. Ronald Reagan, the US president most widely credited with winning the Cold War, was revered in Poland. And his successors have often found a warm welcome on European tours. Poland, mindful of its debt to the US and eager to build stronger ties with the West, sent troops into the early 21st century US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, even as many of Washington’s oldest allies resisted join the last conflict. Over the next two days, Biden will meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda and he is expected to visit US forces sent to bolster Poland’s defenses. Biden hinted that he too would visit some of the thousands of Ukrainian refugees in the country, to highlight the dire humanitarian crisis unleashed by Putin that is straining government and health services in Eastern Europe. Biden, who announced Thursday that the United States would accept up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, hinted after a NATO summit that he would meet with some of the crowds fleeing Putin’s civilian bombing in Ukraine. This volunteer paramedic helps refugees escape from Ukraine 3:07 Before that possible visit, the president reflected on the refugees he had met in camps in other parts of the world over the years. “You see fatherless children in those camps … men and women who are completely lost … and you see that blank look on their faces, that absolute feeling of ‘My God, where am I?'” Biden said. Poland is used to being a presidential metaphor US presidents have long viewed Poland as an example of safeguarding the freedoms NATO was created to serve and have praised its long and successful battle for its very existence , a fight that Ukraine is now waging. Poland was gutted in the mid-20th century when almost all of its sizeable Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust. The preserved camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, west of the southern city of Krakow, stand as an eerie reminder of the horrors of Nazi occupation. However, the fall of the Third Reich did not bring liberation. Poland then endured almost half a century of communist repression imposed by Russia. In 2003, in Krakow, President George W. Bush praised NATO’s eastward expansion, which has so rankled Putin, saying it had brought “the peace and security of our alliance to the young democracies of Europe.” . At the time, however, Bush was more concerned about the twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks than he was about renewed confrontation with Moscow. In 2014, marking the 25th anniversary of an election that began a process that led to the fall of the communist rulers in Warsaw, President Barack Obama said: “The victory of 1989 was not inevitable. It was the culmination of centuries of Polish struggle “. Ukrainian family separated by war reunites in Poland 2:43 But Trump chose a different tone when traveling to Warsaw in 2017 to align himself with right-wing forces in Poland and Europe hostile to the EU, a bloc the then-president abhorred. In a speech that redefined traditional Western values ​​and developed his own brand of populist nationalism, Trump reaffirmed NATO’s Article 5 credo that an attack on one member is an attack on all. But he also criticized US intelligence assessments that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election in comments that bolstered Putin, warned that a wave of Muslim immigration and lax border controls threatened Western values, and lashed out at American journalists. in a nation that had been accused by the EU of eroding its own press freedoms. Biden’s message will be very different. After meeting with Duda in Warsaw on Saturday, the president will deliver a speech that the White House says will frame Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a challenge to the central purpose of his presidency at home and abroad: to ensure “a future rooted in on democratic principles.