The Russia-Ukraine war will make Poland a new military power in Europe

Poland is determined to do it to become a major European military power. Russian aggression against Ukraine is shifting the cornerstones of geopolitics. Military strength is once again an essential part of the equation and some European countries are determined to equip themselves with an armed deterrence capability rather than relying solely on the protection provided by the NATO umbrella.

The most important is Poland. Polish they have already spent 2% of GDP on defense as the Atlantic Alliance asks its members (more than half do not comply), but from 2.4% in 2022 it will go to 5%. Nobody in Europe spends so much on defense.

The Polish government, of the ultra-conservative PiS party, maintains predictable bad relations with Russia Vladimir Putin, but he’s not even Germany’s best friend.

This year he came to ask Berlin to pay him war reparations for the occupation during the Second World War. Among the countries of the European Union it is understood that these claims were left behind when the EU was founded.

Maximum alert

The fall of the remains of Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles trying to intercept a Russian ballistic missile (according to the version given by NATO and by Warsaw itself) has caused the Polish government to reinforce the belief that it must be a military power much more important than it is today.

The Poles put their armed forces on high alert but remained calm and since a few hours after the explosion they recognized it had not been a Russian attack.

The Poles want to confirm an open secret in Europe. Ignoring the British and French military nuclear power, Poland today it has better armed forces compared to countries such as Germany, Italy or Spain. And you want to strengthen them.

While many thought for years that conventional wars were a thing of the past, that they could spend what they spent on weapons on other things until the 1990s, Poland continued to upgrade its military.

The government thinks of deterrence. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said this in early November “The Polish army must be so powerful that it doesn’t have to fight”. Its defense minister, Mariusz Blaszczak, said in July: “We will have the most powerful ground forces in Europe.”

thousands of soldiers

Public data shows that Poland has nearly twice as many tanks and artillery pieces as Germany. While the Germans, with 82 million inhabitants, can mobilize 170,000 soldiers, the Poles expect have 300,000 by the middle of the next decade.

Poland has also for years had tens of thousands of young people and adults, both men and women, undergo military training a few weekends a year. They are non-permanent members of a citizen militia as well as workers or students.

The idea would serve, in the event of a conflict, to mobilize, as Ukraine has done, tens of thousands of civilians with military knowledge. Unlike other European armies (the German, Dutch or Belgian, among others), the Polish He has no problem recruiting new soldiers.

The growth of the Armed Forces costs money. But the Polish government is scratching its pockets. In recent months he has signed a contract for $4.9 billion to buy 250 US Abrams tanks and another $4.6 billion to buy 32 F-35 fighters. But not everything is spent in the US.

Poland has signed a contract with South Korea to build six civilian nuclear reactors and has been negotiating military contracts in the meantime. the stakes will pay more than 10,000 million dollars in Korean weapons – mainly more tanks and more artillery.

Nobody in Brussels says anything against these massive arms purchases, but privately they would like the money to be spent on the European defense industry, not in American and in Korean.

But political anger with Poland continues in Brussels, to the point of bringing its government before the Court of Justice of the European Union for what is considered a drift against the independence of the judicial system.

pp