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| Poland Hardens Its Defenses Against Russ |
| 06 Jun 23 22:42:31 |
From: lessgovt@gmail.com Poland Hardens Its Defenses Against Russia By Jillian Kay Melchior, May 30, 2023, WSJ WARSAW--Russia’s invasion of Ukraine left Poland more vulnerable. Most of the country’s northern and eastern borders—some 730 miles—is adjacent to Ukraine, Belarus (a client of Moscow) or Russia itself (the exclave of Kaliningrad). Warsaw has steeply increased defense spending to strengthen its military. But leaders here worry whether NATO is up to the task. “We need to adjust our security policy toward this challenge,” Radoslaw Fogiel, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the lower house of Poland’s Parliament, says of the alliance. He and his colleagues express concern about Western Europe’s military weakness and America’s staying power. Since 1994 Alexander Lukashenko has ruled Belarus, but demonstrations erupted after the rigged presidential election in 2020. Mr. Lukashenko needed Mr. Putin’s help to quell the protests, and Russia’s president hasn’t let him forget the favor. Lukashenko is like an ocean swimmer fighting a deadly undertow; he’s frantically paddling, but Fogiel wonders “if he didn’t cross the point of no return already.” In April Putin said a 28-point plan for integrating Russia and Belarus is 74% complete and “we will certainly continue this effort without slowing down.” He touted the two countries’ collaborations on energy and electricity, cultural issues, economics, security and defense. That last item has Poland particularly alarmed. This month Moscow and Minsk signed an agreement to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to a storage facility in Belarus. Last month Belarus’s Defense Ministry reported that the country’s troops had finished training to use tactical nukes. Mr. Putin has moved S-400 surface-to-air and Iskander short-range missile systems to Belarus and stationed thousands of Russian troops there under the guise of training. Lukashenko hasn’t dispatched Belarusian troops to Ukraine, but Russian tanks rolled from Belarus toward Kyiv in February 2022, and the Russians have fired missiles at Ukraine from Belarusian soil. As the Kremlin reaches westward in Ukraine and Belarus, Poland aims to strengthen its deterrence and defense. Last year lawmakers passed a bill mandating a minimum of 3% of gross domestic product for defense spending. This year military spending will be closer to 4%, at around 98 billion zloty, or more than $23 billion, plus up to some $11 billion more this year from a separate Armed Forces Support Fund. Poland has been buying tens of billions of dollars of military equipment from the U.S., the U.K. and South Korea. Contrast Poland’s hardening of its defenses with Western Europe. Germany and France were among the countries that failed last year to reach NATO’s benchmark of spending at least 2% of GDP on defense, according to the alliance’s recent estimates. Popular Mechanics defense reporter Kyle Mizokami forecasts that Poland is now on track to have “more tanks than the U.K., Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy combined” by 2030. Wladyslaw Teofil Bartoszewski, deputy chairman of the lower house’s Foreign Affairs Committee, says Poland would like to buy more German Leopard tanks, but Berlin couldn’t deliver them before 2027: “They do not have the industrial capacity.” Europe’s defense companies won’t ramp up manufacturing unless they’re confident of long-term increases in military spending. A commitment now may prove a bargain. “If we are losing Ukraine, which is absolutely out of my imagination, can you imagine our investments when the Russian army will be, you know, in Belarus and Brest and Lviv?” Gen. Rajmund T. Andrzejczak, Poland’s highest-ranking officer, said at a foreign-policy and defense conference in Warsaw in May. (Brest, Belarus, and Lviv, Ukraine, are near the Polish border.) Warsaw is uneasy about America’s long-term commitment to the region. Bartoszewski criticizes the Western European attitude that “we don’t have to spend the money because [America] will defend us. . . . Imagine a President DeSantis comes and says: No. I won’t.’ ” Bogdan Klich, a former defense minister who is now chairman of the Polish Senate’s Committee on Foreign Affairs and the European Union, says that despite Ukraine’s bipartisan support in the U.S., “everything depends on who is the president.” He fears a second Trump administration would undermine NATO’s political and military unity. Bartoszewski suggests that the Biden administration’s “disgraceful evacuation of the American soldiers from Afghanistan” helped convince Putin that he could invade Ukraine without serious consequences. Had the U.S. failed to support Ukraine, China might have concluded that the Americans wouldn’t defend Taiwan either. “America, by showing strength in Europe, helps American interests in the Pacific,” he says. “If the U.S. wants Europe to be united in whatever happens in the struggle with China we cannot afford ourselves to have a threat in our backyard,” says Fogiel. The war in Ukraine is “a real opportunity to contain, to defeat Russia, for a very small percent of our defense budget, with no American presence on the ground.” For the U.S., in short, it’s “a bargain.” For Poland, it’s an urgent necessity. https://www.wsj.com/articles/poland-hardens-its-defenses-against russia-nato-national-security-spending-belarus-ukraine-invasion-e06c1c5 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2) |
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