After Poland reacted to the arrival of Wagner mercenary troops to Belarus by moving some of its troops to its eastern border, Russia's Vladimir Putin accused Warsaw of trying to seize more land in eastern Europe.
Putin claimed there were press reports about forming a Polish-Lithuanian unit that would operate in western Ukraine. He also warned that any attack on Belarus, Moscow's sole ally in Europe, would be treated as an attack on Russia.
"It is well known that they also dream of the Belarusian lands," Putin said.
Speaking ahead of a meeting of Russia's Security Council, Putin said that Russia would respond "with all means at our disposal.
Here are more major developments in Russia's war in Ukraine from Thursday, July 21:
Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed the West is running out of "cannon fodder" in Ukraine and said Polish leaders were seeking to intervene under the umbrella of NATO.
"The perspective is obvious," Putin said. "If Polish troops enter, for example, Lviv or other Ukrainian territories, they will stay there. And they will stay there forever."
The Russian president also spoke at length about Poland's alleged history of claiming territories of other countries. According to Putin, this history culminated in 1939 with Poland being cast away by its Western allies to be "eaten" by Nazi Germany. In reality, Berlin and Moscow agreed to divide Polish territory in 1939 after Germany and the Soviet Union formed a non-aggression pact.
He did not make any comparison to Moscow's illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 or its claims that regions of eastern Ukraine occupied by Russian forces are part of Russia.
Putin claimed the Soviet Union restored Polish independence after WWII and allowed it to expand into German territories.
"Have our friends in Warsaw forgotten about this? We will remind them," Putin said, instructing its foreign intelligence chief to closely monitor Warsaw's actions.
For the same reason fascists constantly accuse of "virtue signalling." Dickheads like this have convinced us everyone is secretly as much of an amoral, power-hungry narcissist as them. So when we talk about caring about other people, they assume we must be lying for some kind of political benefit-- because there's absolutely no way we actually care about other people, nobody does that, right?
(This is also how they sleep at night, by the way: sure, they're bad, but everyone else is just as bad as them if not worse, so who cares.)
So yeah, a dickhead like Putin is going to assume every other country must secretly be just as revanchist as his Russia.