The mood in the Poniatowski Palace in Warsaw is as tense as a war room. Diplomats and advisers come and go and the phone is running hot between President Lech Kaczynski’s Chancellery and that of his brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the Prime Minister.

The twins like a scrap and, as they head today to Germany for talks with Chancellor Merkel all their combative instincts have been aroused. Their credo is straightforward: Polish national sovereignty has to be defended against a European Union dominated by Germany and against expanding Russian influence in the politically wobbly borderlands of the East. An EU deal, therefore, cannot be allowed to weaken Poland.

President Kacynski, in an interview with The Times, described this as “our vital interest”. Viewed from Poland, uncomfortably sandwiched between Germany and Russia, it is a logical demand, not just the whim of a wayward leadership. Yesterday, the twins were given cross-party support in the Polish parliament.

“No, no, I’m not Tadeusz Rejtan,” the President says with a tight smile. He was referring to an aristocrat who in 1773 tried single-handedly to prevent parliamentary deputies, sym-pathethic to Russia, from supporting the partition of Poland. “Rejtan failed, you see, whereas we have learnt to be effective in our actions.” Even so, Poles have a history of going it alone, of launching cavalry charges against German tanks. The art of the blockade is part of their national narrative. The twins can win popularity at home by blocking a deal that seems to fa-vour Germany. The brothers’ negotiating strength is that they do not share the German sense of urgency.

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Chancellor Merkel wants a constitutional treaty in place before European elections in June 2009. But Poland has the EU presidency in 2011 and could imagine a new treaty being signed on its watch — if the terms are right. “It is Germany that first of all needs to understand Poland,” the President says. Understanding the twins, however, is a complex matter and the German Chancellor has so far failed to break their secret fraternal code.

The formative event for the brothers was almost certainly the Warsaw uprising of 1944 — the Germans had razed the city, the Russians were waiting passively on the other side of the Vistula, letting the Germans wipe out the Polish resistance. The twins’ father fought in the uprising and their childhood was punctuated with stories of Polish heroism against the Germans and the Russians.

For the twins, the Warsaw uprising was not the first but it was certainly the bloodiest of betrayals of Poland. The latest, the one that stirs their passions the most, is the way that former Communist managers were allowed to take a dominant role in the privatisation of the Polish economy after 1989.

All this fuels a deep scepticism about European integration. Had the current six-month EU presidency been in French hands, one suspects, the twins would have been less stubborn. On a visit to Warsaw this week, President Sarkozy listened carefully to the twins, flattered them and appealed to the historic links between Warsaw and Paris. But the consitutional treaty is being promoted by Germany and the Poles find it difficult to see Chancellor Merkel as an “honest broker”. For them the EU is being shaped into a vehicle for German interests as the country approaches becoming a global power.

What could the German Chancellor offer the twins to still such deep-seated anxie-ties? Perhaps greater EU support for the pet Polish cause of energy security — Warsaw is nervous about the tightening Russian grip on gas supplies to Central Europe. Yet Germany is cooperating with Russia to build a Baltic pipeline that by-passes Poland — hardly the most credible starting point for a new sense of East-West solidarity between the two unhappy neighbours.

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