Poland to buy $100m of US arms for Ukraine in response to Russian rail sabotage

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Poland will buy $100 million (369 million zloty) of weapons from the United States and supply them to Ukraine, Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski has told CNN. He says the move is part of Warsaw’s response to the recent Russian sabotage of a rail line in Poland.

Speaking to the US network on Thursday, Sikorski noted that “Russia deliberately tried to cause a rail crash”. Earlier this week, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that the sabotage was carried out by two Ukrainians working on behalf of Moscow, who then immediately fled to Belarus.

The “intention was clearly to kill Polish citizens”, Sikorski told CNN. But, “due to incompetent actions and a miracle, the train was not derailed”.

“We’ve had arson attacks and assassinations in other European Union countries before, but this was a different attempt, and we know which specific services assigned this task to the perpetrators to cause mayhem and death,” he said.

As part of Poland’s response, “we will spend $100 million on American weapons to be delivered to Ukraine”, added Sikorski. Another element of the response was his order, issued earlier this week, for Russia to close its last remaining consulate in Poland, in the city of Gdańsk.

Sikorski’s announcement was criticised by Sławomir Mentzen, one of the leaders of the far-right opposition group Confederation (Konfederacja), which has been opposed to the large amounts of money Poland has spent on supporting Ukraine.

Mentzen pointed to recent revelations of a major corruption scandal in Ukraine, and suggested that “maybe Ukrainians should stop stealing, then there would be no need to help them”.

“Polish taxpayers’ money should go towards the needs of Poles, not to be plundered in Ukraine,” he added.

Sikorski responded to Mentzen’s post, saying that he was “distorting” the truth. The foreign minister noted that the money was not being given to Ukraine, but would be provided to NATO’s PURL fund, which purchases US weapons for Ukraine.

Speaking in the parliament on Friday morning, Tusk echoed Sikorski’s remarks, saying that the “sabotage actions, inspired and directly organised by the Kremlin for many months, have recently crossed a critical threshold”.

The goal of these actions, among which Tusk also listed an attempted attack on the Polish ambassador to Russia last Sunday, is “destruction, human lives, and the destabilisation of the foundations of the Polish state”.

On Wednesday, prosecutors announced that they have drafted charges against the two Ukrainian citizens responsible for the sabotage. On Thursday, the foreign ministry said that it had issued a diplomatic note to Belarus requesting the suspects’ extradition.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Poland has been one of Kyiv’s strongest supporters, supplying significant military, financial, humanitarian and diplomatic support

Poland has delivered more tanks to Ukraine than any other donor country, with those transfers valued at around $682 million, according to the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker. Overall, Warsaw has provided $3.6 billion-worth of military aid, the tenth-largest contribution among all countries.

The war across its eastern border has also pushed Poland to step up its own defence spending, including major arms deals with the United States and South Korea for hundreds of tanks, planes, and other hardware. As a result, Poland is now NATO’s biggest defence spender relative to GDP.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland/Flickr (under CC BY-NC 4.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.