MOSCOW, May 13. /TASS/. Thoughts of moving troops to the territory of western Ukraine do visit the Polish leaders’ minds, but they have not taken final shape yet, Russia’s ambassador to Poland, Sergey Andreyev, said on Russia’s TV Channel One on Friday.
"I believe that such thoughts do visit their minds from time to time, but as for their real, concrete implementation, I believe that nothing has been thoroughly considered yet, let alone decided," he said, when asked about the possibility Poland might send its troops to the western regions of Ukraine on the pretext of their protection.
Andreyev said that Warsaw denied it had plans for moving troops to Ukraine and kept saying its prime concern was to support its neighbor’s territorial integrity. He stressed there was a well-known proposal, put forward by the leader of the ruling Law and Justice party, Jaroslaw Kaczinski, "for conducting a peace-keeping operation in a NATO format or some other format."
"When this idea failed to earn support either from the Americans or from NATO, the Polish side, the Polish authorities avoided abandoning it altogether and said they kept working on it, but at the same time put in on hold," Andreyev said.
On April 28, the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence SVR, Sergey Naryshkin, said that Washington and Warsaw, according to his sources, were considering plans for establishing Poland’s tight military and political control of its "historical possessions" in Ukraine.
In the first phase of such "reunification" Polish troops would be deployed to the western regions of Ukraine on the pretext of their defense. A so-called peace-keeping contingent would be stationed in those parts of Ukraine where the risk of a direct clash with the Russian army would be minimal.
One day earlier, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, said that Poland might be gauging the chances for actual annexation of western Ukraine.