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In 1386, the last pagan ruler of Lithuania, Jogaila, married the child queen of Poland, Jadwiga, then in her early teens. The marriage created a political ...

And why would Western European nations acquiesce to (and largely pay for) the rise of a new European power that irrevocably shifts the EU’s center of gravity to the east? Given old Europe’s chronic fecklessness, illustrated by the EU’s misadventures in the Balkans, Ukraine’s future is too important to be left in the hands of Brussels, Paris, and Berlin. But that is not news, regardless of the nature of the postwar political settlement. Subsidiarity ought to be the guiding principle of such efforts, particularly because the purpose of the union would not be to efface Ukrainian identity or statehood—quite the contrary. Unlike in 1990, when East Germans contended themselves with embracing the existing West German Basic Law and, in fact, the entire legal and political system of their more developed democratic cousins, a Polish-Ukrainian union would require drafting a new constitutional document and building shared federal or confederal institutions—in addition to what would be a complex unification treaty. [estimated](https://www.economist.com/europe/2007/05/24/blossoming-landscapes) to have been transferred from the West to the East, or around half of Germany’s annual GDP, [much in the form of transfers](https://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/publications/pages/publication1437_en.pdf) through the welfare system. There is no downplaying the complexity of the unification, particularly of its legal and regulatory aspects, which were complicated further by Germany’s European commitments. [passed legislation](https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/04/22/one-million-ukraine-refugees-receive-polish-id-numbers-as-government-extends-support-for-host-families/https:/notesfrompoland.com/2022/04/22/one-million-ukraine-refugees-receive-polish-id-numbers-as-government-extends-support-for-host-families/) allowing Ukrainian refugees to obtain Polish ID numbers, giving them thus access to a host of social and healthcare benefits normally reserved for Polish nationals. The Polish-Ukrainian Union would become the second-largest country in the EU and arguably its largest military power, providing more than an adequate counterweight to the Franco-German tandem—something that the EU is sorely missing after Brexit. Instead of a rambling, somewhat chaotic country of 43 million lingering in no-man’s land, Western Europe would be buffered from Russia by a formidable country with a very clear understanding of the Russian threat. Fast-forward to the present and to the near future, however. Two, the union addressed the immediate security concern facing both Poles and Lithuanians: the threat of Teutonic Knights.