Poland plans to complete a new set of anti-drone fortifications along its eastern borders within two years, a top defence official has said, after a massive incursion of unmanned Russian aerial combat vehicles into Polish airspace earlier this year.
“We expect to have the first capabilities of the system in roughly six months, perhaps even sooner. And the full system will take 24 months to complete,” the deputy defence minister, Cezary Tomczyk, told the Guardian in an interview in Warsaw.
Tomczyk said the new air defence systems would be integrated into an older line of protection constructed a decade ago. He said it would involve different layers of defence, including machine guns, cannon, missiles and drone-jamming systems.
“Some of this is for use only in extreme or war conditions. For example, these multi-barrel machine guns are difficult to use in peacetime, because everything that goes up must go down,” he said.
More than a dozen suspected Russian drones entered Polish airspace in September, in an incident that led to airport closures, fighter jets being scrambled, and damage to buildings on the ground as drones were shot down. The foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, told the Guardian at the time that the attacks, which involved drones not carrying any ammunition, were an attempt by Russia “to test us without starting a war”.
Since then, Poland has updated plans already in the works to reinforce its eastern borders. While no anti-drone system can be fully effective against the kind of systematic and massive targeting that Ukraine has been subjected to, European nations along the eastern flank are scrambling to upgrade their systems to match the new threat. Tomczyk said the project would cost more than €2bn (£1.75bn), and would be mostly financed with European funds under the SAFE (Security Action for Europe) defence loan programme, as well as some contributions for the state budget.
During almost four years of full-scale war in Ukraine, Poland has increasingly put itself on a war footing, as cases of sabotage and arson which Polish services link to Russian intelligence agencies are on the rise. The country has plans to train hundreds of thousands of citizens in survival skills while others are taking voluntary military training.
In addition to the anti-drone wall, Poland is also conducting fortifications along its land borders with Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, known as the Eastern Shield and aimed at preventing a future Russian invasion. Tomczyk said special logistics hubs would be built in every border municipality, where equipment to help block the border would be stored, ready to be deployed in a matter of hours.
“The truth is that as long as Ukraine is defending itself and fighting Russia, Europe is not at risk of war in the conventional, strict sense of the word. What we will face instead are provocations and acts of sabotage,” said Tomczyk. But, he said, if the west allowed Russia to win in Ukraine, it could be not long before the Kremlin set its sights on Europe.
Poland has boosted its defence spending to 4.7% of GDP, one of the highest rates in the European Union, amid continuing fears over Russian hybrid operations and potential military threats to the country.
“Today, Ukraine is spending around 40% of its GDP on the war, and anyone wondering what percentage we should devote to the military ought to ask themselves whether it’s better to raise spending from, say, 2% to 3 or 3.5%, or to let it rise from 2% all the way to 40% later,” Tomczyk said.
Questioned over whether Russia really had military designs on Poland in the same way it did on Ukraine, which the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has long said was central to Russian identity, Tomczyk pointed to the long history of Russian aggression and expansionism in eastern Europe. He said that “like in Orwell’s 1984”, messaging about the enemy of the day could quickly be changed.
“These conquests function mainly as a political tool for maintaining power: a recurring motif in Russian history. The government needs to show that it is strong, that it commands a powerful army, that no one should dare to challenge it. In that sense, an external war becomes a domestic instrument in Russia,” he said.