Poles Surge Into Military Training as War Fears Rise

Six kilometres from the Russian border at Braniewo, Poles from office administrators to students are digging trenches and learning to fire as voluntary military courses fill up—anxieties sharpened by a Russian drone incursion into Polish airspace and a government push to harden the country’s eastern frontier.

A Surge in Volunteers

Poland’s Central Military Recruitment Centre says voluntary training numbers have matched last year’s record pace, with officials projecting around 40,000 civilians will complete courses in 2025; at Braniewo, where South Korean K-2 tanks rumble on the range, 36-year-old Agnieszka Jedruszak explains, “I’d do anything to keep my child safe… I would definitely want to fight to protect him,” while Deputy Defence Minister Cezary Tomczyk stresses that in crisis “the most basic things… count: fuel, ammunition and people.”

Drones, Doctrine and the East Shield

This week’s drone episode—publicly shrugged off by Washington’s top leader as possibly accidental, a view Warsaw rejects—has already spurred NATO to bolster air and ground defences on the eastern flank, even as Poland accelerates the “East Shield,” a multi-hundred-kilometre belt of anti-tank “hedgehogs,” mobility obstacles, sensors and electronic warfare to delay any attack and give defenders time to manoeuvre.

Europe’s Reliance and Poland’s Bet

While Warsaw has vaulted to the top of NATO’s spending league at a projected 4.7% of GDP and grown its forces to roughly 216,000, experts caution that Europe still leans heavily on U.S. capabilities for high-end air defence and munitions, a gap Poland tries to hedge with reserves and Territorial Defence Forces that can be mobilised locally—“people… serving in places where they’ll be defending their own homes,” as a senior official puts it, even as analyst Gustav Gressel notes Eastern Europeans “are more willing to fight because they can’t just run away.”