WARSAW: Russia poses an “existential threat” to Poland and its military is lagging, the country´s armed forces chief warned senior officials on Wednesday.
Poland, the largest country on Nato´s eastern flank and a neighbour of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, is the western alliance´s largest spender in relative terms.
This year, the country is allocating 4.8 per cent of its GDP to defence, just shy of the alliance´s five per cent target to be met by 2035.
However, that record defence spending was not enough to “make up for nearly three decades of chronic underfunding of the armed forces,” General Wieslaw Kukula, chief of the general staff, argued at the meeting, which included top officers, the defence minister and Poland´s president.
The general highlighted a low “pace of technical modernisation”, compared to increases in the army´s size.
Kukula said the Polish army should reach 500,000 soldiers by 2039, compared with around 210,000 at present.
As a result of a lack of updates, some new Polish units “are not achieving combat readiness,” due to insufficient equipment, rather than a personnel shortage, the general argued.
