Poland preparing €2bn anti-drone fortifications along its eastern border amid Russian threat

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. A border post in the Podlasie region of north-east Poland, at the border with Belarus, which is to be fortified.Photograph: Jędrzej Nowicki/The Guardian The Polish border with Belarus in the Podlasie region, where fortifications will be aimed at preventing any future Russian invasion.Photograph: Jędrzej Nowicki/The Guardian Border fence in the Podlasie region; Poland’s eastern border municipalities are to receive logistics hubs.Photograph: Jędrzej Nowicki/The Guardian A Polish military helicopter patrols the border with Belarus in the Podlasie region.Photograph: Jędrzej Nowicki/The Guardian “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...

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