President Andrzej Duda spoke after a meeting of the joint chiefs of staff and the defense minister. He began by saying that this was the first such meeting since the pandemic, the hybrid attack on the Polish border with Belarus and the war in Ukraine.
These events inevitably mean that there is a need to review the structure of the armed forces, logistics, equipment and systems of command.
Duda admitted that one of the key topics of discussion was the cooperation with allies ahead of the Madrid NATO summit at the end of the month and in the aftermath of the meeting of the Bucharest Nine last week.
He made it clear that “we want to ensure that we get the strengthening of the NATO presence on the eastern flank. Instead of the Enhanced Forward Presence we want to strengthen defense through an increase in the number of NATO forces present in our part of Europe,” said the President of Poland.
Duda also stressed the importance of territorial defense in the discussions held with the chiefs of staff. He said that the Territorial Defense Forces (WOT) were developing well and had been effective in actions combating extreme weather events and in various initiatives relating to coping with the events in Ukraine.
Minister of defense Mariusz Błaszczak reported that people were volunteering to serve in the army as volunteer conscripts. He also reminded about Poland’s active seeking of new modern military equipment from South Korea and the need to strengthen artillery capacity. He concluded that the main task of Polish armed forces stationed in the east of the country was to ensure that not an inch of Polish soil would fall under foreign occupation.
