MOSCOW, April 24. /TASS/. Rethinking the way state borders are fixed is becoming an increasingly important issue for the Polish leadership amid the Ukrainian crisis, Sergey Naryshkin, who heads Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), said in a statement on Monday.
"According to reports the SVR has been getting, a geopolitical redistribution, including the redrawing of the state’s boundaries, is becoming increasingly critical for the Polish government amid the Ukrainian crisis," Naryshkin said.
According to his statement, anti-German sentiment in Poland, along with ambitions to seize territories in western Ukraine, have already affected Warsaw’s military plans.
"Apart from ambitions to seize Ukraine’s western regions, anti-German sentiment and concerns over Berlin’s potential revanchist claims to the former German territories which were ceded to Poland after World War II have intensified in Warsaw," the statement reads. According to it, this "suspicion toward Germany has already affected Poland’s military plans."
In fact, modern-day Poland is going back to the days of Jozef Pilsudski when Warsaw was fighting with all its neighbors and wanted to expand its territory, the SVR emphasized. "This is exactly the Poland that Winston Churchill called "the hyena of Europe" ahead of WWII," the SVR said.
In late March, the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces held an exercise to practice rebuffing a potential military attack from the west, the SVR said. Under the scenario, the enemy, a country lying west of Poland that relies on a national diaspora (ethnic Germans) in the West Pomeranian Voivodeship, launches "a military aggression." As part of the maneuvers, an offensive is prepared to seize the city of Szczecin and its sea port, as well as Szczecin-Goleniow Airport. The exercise posits that "the aggressor’s troops" conduct combat reconnaissance, while sabotage groups and cells of radicals from among ethnic minorities are active on the territory that is being defended, with artillery and air strikes expected to be delivered. Three Polish military brigades were tasked with holding the enemy back near Tanowo and Pargowo.