The New Intermarium?

By Toni Stenström
The author studied international relations, Slavic languages, and Russian and East European Studies at the University of Helsinki from 2012 to 2019. He has worked in diplomatic missions in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. In 2024, his book about Belarusian history was published by German academic publishing house Ibidem.

​Józef Piłsudski, the Marshal of Poland from the early 20th century, had a dream of a Pan-European alliance spanning from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. He believed only a strong block of nations, sandwiched between Germany and Russia, could guarantee peace and stability in a post-WWI Eastern Europe. His plan failed due to the Polish-Soviet War in 1919–1921, but a hundred years later, we are closer than ever to realizing a new Commonwealth of Nations, also known as Intermarium.

With the accession of Finland and Sweden in NATO in 2023–2024, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization controls almost the entire Baltic Sea, excluding the coasts of the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast and St. Petersburg. The Black Sea states of Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey are also members of the alliance, and an active war is being fought for the futures of Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and Moldova. In the event of a Ukrainian victory and the country's successful integration into NATO, Pilsudski's dream might finally come true in the form of a modern Intermarium Alliance.

During the full-scale war in Ukraine, Poland has become one of the most important logistical and strategic hubs of Europe's contemporary security architecture. In 2024, Poland spends over 4,12% of its GDP on national defense, making it NATO’s biggest defense spender as proportion of GDP.

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Unlike in most of Europe, Poland's economic growth was uninterrupted even during the Great Recession of 2008, and its salary level is projected to reach Western European standards by the mid-2030s. Millions of Ukrainian refugees, as well as thousands of political dissidents from Belarus and Russia, have also found a new home in the country during the first half of the 2020s, turning Poland's demographic growth upwards.

In the 1920s, Piłsudski's Poland succeeded in forming a smaller alliance with France and Romania. During the War in Ukraine, the same countries have proven loyal allies to the Ukrainians, with Emmanuel Macron playing with the idea of sending French ground forces to Western Ukraine. Romania, on its part, has built a 450-kilometer-long Autostrada Moldovei from its capital city of Bucharest to the Ukrainian border in Bukovina. In the future, the highway could be linked to the Polish E40 highway via Western Ukraine, creating a new trade corridor from Central Europe to the Balkans. With the accession of Romania to the Schengen zone, much of Europe's maritime trade will also be diverted to its port of Constanța.

If Moldova and Georgia manage to keep their orientation towards the West, and a regime change in Belarus detaches the country from its alliance with Russia, the long shadow of the old Soviet empire may finally disappear from the map of Eastern Europe. Yet, the greatest battles are being fought exactly where they were a hundred years ago – the Wild Fields of Ukraine. As Piłsudski allegedly said, “There is no free Ukraine without an independent Poland, and there is no free Poland without an independent Ukraine.” As we move towards 2025, we will see if Europe has learned its lesson from the past.


​The author is solely responsible for the views expressed in this guest article and they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Mission Grey Inc.

(Image: By GalaxMaps - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91974044)