Poland signs €4.5 billion deal to buy three submarines from Sweden

Jun 29, 2026 | Business, Defence, Featured, Politics

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

Poland has signed an agreement worth around €4.5 billion to buy three A26 submarines from Swedish manufacturer Saab as part of efforts to modernise its navy.

The deal was among a number signed during intergovernmental consultations between Sweden and Poland today, as the two countries further strengthened an increasingly important alliance.

Last year, Poland announced that it had chosen Sweden as the preferred supplier of submarines under its Orka programme, which aims to modernise the Polish naval fleet.

Poland currently only has one submarine, a 40-year-old Soviet-era vessel that is in need of constant repair. It wants to replace that with three of the A26 Blekinge-class submarines that are being developed by Saab but have not yet gone into service.

Today, a purchase agreement for the vessels was signed in the Polish Baltic coast city of Gdynia amid talks between the two countries’ prime ministers, Donald Tusk and Ulf Kristersson, and delegations that included their foreign, finance, infrastructure and culture ministers.

Speaking at a press conference alongside Tusk, Kristersson said that the agreement was worth around 50 billion Swedish kronor (19.3 billion zloty, €4.5 billion) and that the first submarine would be delivered in 2031 (though many Polish media outlets have reported a date of 2030).

In a separate statement, Saab valued the deal at around 47 billion kronor. It noted that delivery of the submarines was scheduled to take place by 2038.

When the plans were first announced last year, the Polish government emphasised that the deal would also involve major Swedish investment in Poland’s shipbuilding industry as well as knowledge transfer.

Today, Polish state defence group PGZ announced that, alongside the submarine purchase agreement, it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Saab “paving the way for building competencies in Poland in the area of servicing and maintaining submarines”.

Kristersson said that “hundreds of Polish companies will be subcontractors to this important project”, with “our two countries sharing technology and techniques in this crucial strategic area”.

“This cooperation with Sweden is a further impetus for the development of our arms industry,” added Tusk. “This isn’t a simple matter of one side or the other purchasing, but a genuine, truly collaborative partnership that benefits both industries.”

Both leaders also emphasised that the deal was a signal of growing security and trade ties between their two countries, which in 2024 signed a strategic partnership agreement to enhance cooperation on defence, economic development and support for Ukraine.

 

“Our cooperation in the Baltic Sea has fundamentally changed the security situation,” declared Tusk. “We do all this also so that our region, our two countries and the Baltic Sea are an area of ​​peace and security, and not, as is the case today, an area of ​​anxiety and threat.”

“Relations between Poland and Sweden are the best they’ve ever been, deeper and stronger than ever before,” added Kristersson. “We face exactly the same challenges and share the same perspective on what’s happening now.”

In recent years, Poland has increasingly oriented itself towards the Baltic region, forming closer economic, energy and military ties with the Baltic and Nordic states.

Poland’s defence minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, today noted that the A26 submarines are specifically designed to operate in the Baltic Sea, including with stealth systems making them difficult to detect in shallow waters and tools to protect underwater infrastructure such as cables and pipelines.

There have been growing concerns in recent years over Russian actions in the Baltic, including threats to infrastructure. In response, NATO has launched a new operation to patrol the sea while Poland and Sweden last year held their first bilateral military drills in the Baltic.

Polish security news and analysis service Defence24, however, notes that there is an element of risk attached to Poland’s decision to order submarines from a programme that has been repeatedly delayed and faced ever-rising costs.

Meanwhile, it was also announced today that Poland has signed an agreement to lease an A17 Västergötland-class submarine, the HMS Södermanland, from Sweden as a so-called “gap filler” until the first A26 is delivered, reports industry news service WNP.


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: KPRM/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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