Poland upgrades navy against Russia’s Baltic threat

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Warsaw is building three frigates at Gdynia on Poland’s northern Baltic coast and agreed to buy three Swedish submarines in November. It has also launched new minesweepers and started construction of a rescue ship to support submarine operations.

The acquisitions are intended to reverse decades of under-investment in the country’s navy, which operates one submarine, a Soviet-built vessel transferred to Poland in 1986, and two frigates built in the US in the 1970s.

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Higher defence spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has mostly gone to the air force and the army, which is now the EU’s largest.

“The Russian threat is spreading and we cannot ignore now their hybrid warfare, as seen for example with the rupturing of cables,” said Paweł Bejda, Poland’s deputy defence minister. “Poland needs to be a very active participant in ensuring security in the Baltic Sea.”

Russia’s recent use of hybrid tactics has heightened concerns about Nato’s vulnerability in the Baltic Sea. While Russia’s Baltic fleet is based in neighbouring Kaliningrad, Poland and other states have accused Moscow of orchestrating sabotage attacks on undersea power and data cables, as well as launching drones that violated Nato’s airspace.

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The frigate programme also comes as the UK and Poland aim to sign a new bilateral defence agreement in the coming months, after UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer launched talks during a visit to Warsaw last January.

The head of the Royal Navy, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, told the FT that Russia’s elite deep-sea sabotage unit was poised to deploy submersibles capable of damaging British seabed cables and pipelines.

While the politicians negotiated their bilateral agreement, Babcock’s Goldsack said: “It’s got to be to both countries’ advantages to have more than one shipyard that can operate on the same class of ships.”