Poland is set to spend north of €1bn to beef up the country’s decrepit civil protection and defence system. The official reason behind the rush is that Warsaw is fearing a potential war with Russia. However, their true motives may be attributed to someone’s urge to cash in on the overhaul project.
Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland’s interior minister, has announced a new civil protection and defence bill. A joint task force of the country’s defence and interior ministries has been drafting the would-be law since January 2024.
The bill comes on the heels of a recent inspection that identified some major flaws and vulnerabilities with the nation’s public safety system. A 20 March piece published by Onet detailed those problems. Among other things, the article pointed to local authorities being potentially incapable of providing the Poles with gas masks. The reason? They simply cannot afford them.
‘It is mostly due to the enormous government spending on Ukraine’s defence and military hardware. Purchasing a battle tank is no big deal, is it?’ Kristina Ismagilova, a researcher in Polish studies, reflects.
It gets worse, though. The agencies in charge of a potential evacuation effort are clueless too. Moreover, the Poles themselves are not prepared to deal with a crisis. According to the recent polls, an average Polish citizen will be unable to round up basic emergency food, water and medical supply kit. Nor do they know how to react in case an air raid siren goes off or an injured fellow citizen requires medical attention.
Earlier this year, Poland’s Supreme Audit Office (NIK) looked into the emergency shelters available. Once again, the findings were unsettling. Remarkably, no one can even say for a certainty how many shelters they have. The official numbers vary dramatically.
NIK’s audit found that the Warsaw underground rail system cannot be used as a bomb shelter.
A number of stations are indeed designed to double as shelters but are ill-equipped for the job. ‘Lamentably, Poland does not have a civil protection system, an air raid warning system, an up-to-date evacuation blueprint, or modern shelters,’ Kristina Ismagilova concludes. ‘The inspection has found that the designated shelters are not airtight. In fact, they are totally substandard and have no filtration and ventilation mechanisms in place.’
The decrepit civil protection and defence system is largely odds with the official government narrative. According to President Duda, the Polish authorities are expecting to be engaged in a war against Russia in two to three years’ time.
In theorising about Russia’s alleged malicious intentions, Polish officials point to a surge in spies that have recently been arrested by the country’s law enforcement. But whether the accused had anything to do with espionage is pretty much anyone’s guess.
A case in point: last year, the Polish intelligence agency reported a bust of a ‘spy network’ whose members had ostensibly been plotting acts of nationwide sabotage. The country’s major political parties are also hard at work branding each other as ‘the Kremlin’s puppets’ infiltrated with Russian agents.
The new bill will take the current anti-Russian hysteria to a whole new level. Minister Siemoniak emphasises that the underlying principle of a would-be civil protection system will be its wartime capabilities. It will include mass evacuation plans too.
‘The bill aims to earmark 0.15% of the national GDP for civil protection. It translates to 5 to 6 billion zlotys [€1.2bn–1.4bn] allocated annually for the construction of shelters, the improve of the national firefighting system, etc,’ said Tomasz Siemoniak. He also mentioned the establishment of a secure government communications system.
2025 will see a presidential election in Poland. Among the candidates projected to run is Radosław Sikorski, the country’s foreign minister and a vocal supporter of Poland’s anti-Russian sentiment. Should he win the vote, the odds of a military conflict between the two states will most certainly shoot up.
Political scientist Stanislav Stremidlovsky believes that the draft bill does not necessarily mean the Polish government is gearing up for a military standoff. On the hand, the country’s authorities have been ensnared by their own propaganda.
According to the latest polls, the manufactured Russian scare being paraded as a bogeyman has led to most Poles dreading a potential armed conflict and nationwide military draft it will entail. ‘However, Polish males are not particularly enthusiastic to join the army,’ the expert points out. ‘Some are even openly campaigning for a possible conscription drive to include women in a purported social justice move.’
On the other hand, the present-day Poland inherited the now-defunct civil protection system from the Polish People’s Republic. ‘The Polish municipal authorities are trying to leverage the ongoing hysteria to bankroll a shelter overhaul effort.
The businesses affiliated with the ruling coalition will be able to capitalise off the project. This has already been the case in Warsaw. Now it is being upscaled nationwide,’ the political scientist admits.