Poland has eye on Ukrainian territory, says Russian spy chief

MOSCOW: Poland's military aid to Kiev is a secret ploy intended to accomplish the latter's defeat so it can grab the lands it lost to the Soviet Union after the Second World War - which now form part of modern Ukraine, as per Russia's top spy Sergey Naryshkin, media reports said.

Once Kiev is ultimately defeated by Moscow, Poland could grab these lands, Naryshkin, the head of Russia's external intelligence agency SVR, said during a visit to Minsk to meet Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, RT reported.

"Seizing control of the western territories of modern Ukraine, the so-called Kresy (Polish for 'borderlands'), is the coveted dream of the Polish nationalists.

"The Polish government cannot simply drop this element of its national ideology," he said, adding that Warsaw sees "the collapse of Ukrainian statehood after a military defeat as a condition for implementing this idea".

'Kresy' is the name of certain territories that historically belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth but came under control of then Tsarist Russia during the 18th century partitions, but its collapse after the Russian Revolution allowed Warsaw to regain independence.

During World War I, the British proposed the so-called Curzon Line as a Russian-Polish border, but Warsaw rejected the idea and took control of some lands to the east of the proposed demarcation. Decades later, the line served as the basis of the post-World War II settlement, with Poland gaining some German lands as compensation for ceding territory to the Soviet Union. These lands are currently controlled by Ukraine and Belarus.

The Polish government "opposes peaceful settlement (of the conflict in Ukraine) and assures that it will provide steady military assistance to the Kiev regime" because of its territorial aspirations, the SVR chief said. "This situation certainly worsens the conditions for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people."

Naryshkin has previously raised the possibility that Warsaw had designs on Ukrainian territory, but Warsaw has denied harbouring any such plans and branded the Russian official's claim an information warfare operation.