Kremlin aide warns Polish statehood would ‘cease to exist within two or three days’ in war with Russia

Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said on Tuesday that Poland would quickly “cease to exist” if it entered into an armed conflict with Russia.

Patrushev’s comments were a response to remarks by Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, who said a day earlier that NATO’s European members hold military superiority over Moscow. “If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly,” Sikorski said at the Yalta European Strategy in Kyiv.

“Should Poland join hostilities against Russia, our country will deploy the full arsenal of forces and resources at its disposal, and Polish statehood will cease to exist within two to three days,” Patrushev said.

He accused Sikorski of making an “amateurish” assessment of Russia’s military strength, adding that the Polish minister failed to grasp that Moscow was “by no means using its full potential” in what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.