From digging trenches and building walls, to learning survival skills, Poland is increasingly aware of risks posed by its eastern neighbours

Cezary Pruszko still remembers the civil defence training of his Communist-era schooldays – map reading, survival skills, and a sense that the danger of war was real and ever present.

“My generation grew up with those threats. You didn’t have to explain why this mattered,” said the 60-year-old Pruszko, as he refreshed those skills at an army base outside Warsaw on a recent frosty Saturday morning. With dozens of other Polish civilians, he toured a bomb shelter, fitted gas masks and practised striking sparks from a flint to start a fire.

The training, designed to boost civilian resilience, was part of a new programme that aims to train 400,000 Polish citizens by 2027. The voluntary scheme is open to anyone from schoolchildren to pensioners.

“We are living in the most dangerous times since the end of the second world war,” said Poland’s defence minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, at the programme’s launch earlier this month. “Each of us must have the skills, knowledge and practical knowhow to cope in a crisis.”

There is an acute awareness in Poland of how the country’s geographical location at the centre of Europe has left it historically vulnerable to attack. The full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine in 2022 focused minds, and this year drone incursions into Polish airspace and a wave of sabotage attacks linked to Russian intelligence have added to the alarm. Most recently, a railway line was blown up earlier this month, with authorities claiming Russia organised the attack and had intended to cause casualties.

It has all led to an overhaul of national security thinking. The government has approved a draft budget for next year that will raise defence spending to 4.8% of GDP, comfortably higher than almost all other Nato countries. New buildings must be fitted with bomb shelters, and a programme has begun to re-equip older shelters in a state of disrepair. Construction has begun on an “eastern shield” that will run the length of the country’s borders with Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Civilians taking part in training organised by the Polish military. Photograph: Jedrzej Nowicki/The Guardian

Revising the war games

At a forward operating base a few kilometres from Poland’s border with Belarus, Brig Gen Roman Brudło, the commander of Poland’s 9th armoured cavalry brigade, said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine completely changed the security picture for Poland.

“The quiet times have unfortunately passed, and we are living in a difficult time, in very dynamic times,” he said, in an interview at his field office, located inside a container at the base. “I read the papers, I hear the news, I see the analysis made by different intelligence communities, which are saying that in one, two, five years we will have the possibility to face a full-scale invasion from Russia. I don’t know. I hope not.”

Brig Gen Roman Brudło: ‘I think [Russia] will put pressure on us in a hybrid way.’ Photograph: Jedrzej Nowicki/The Guardian

Brudło joined the army back in 1996, he said, because he was a trained mechanic and “loved tanks”. After nearly three decades serving, which has included rotations with allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, he admitted that in a war against drones or sabotage threats, his training in traditional warfare would need to be revised.

“I’m not tied to the tank, I am not glued to it, and everybody here also went through training preparing us for new kinds of tasks,” he said. “I think [Russia] will put pressure on us in a hybrid way, below the threshold of the war, to make us tired, but not to cross the level when we unite.”

Capt Karol Frankowski, who works in communications for the brigade, recounted how, over the summer, he spent a month at Nato’s annual Saber Junction exercises in Germany, wargaming along with soldiers from more than a dozen countries. The scenario involved a hybrid attack from an unspecified attacker, which caused law and order to break down and martial law to be implemented.

“My job was to make contact with the locals during the crisis – they had actors playing the chief of police, local journalists, other citizens – and we had to act like it was martial law,” he said.

One of Russia’s hybrid tactics, according to Brudło and Frankowski, is the encouragement of “illegal migration” on Europe’s borders. The brigade’s current role is to help border guards detect people attempting to cross into Poland, and thus the Schengen zone, from Belarus. Sensors along the border wall alert the soldiers to any attempts to cross. The day before the Guardian visited, the soldiers said they had apprehended a man from Afghanistan, who would most likely be returned to Belarus.

“For the protection of our country, this is a necessity. We don’t know who this Afghan guy is. Maybe a spy or maybe some kind of person who wants to destroy our country from the inside. Maybe he’s even a Russian spy,” said Frankowski.

The idea that Moscow and Minsk are weaponising migration was used by the previous, nationalist government as the basis for a violent crackdown on migrants who crossed the border ever since the crisis began in 2020. Strikingly, since Donald Tusk’s progressive coalition took over two years ago, little has changed.

The focus on the threat from Russia has even led many liberals, who were previously outraged by the brutal treatment of asylum seekers at the border, to get on board with the government’s tough policies, said Aleksandra Chrzanowska, part of the Grupa Granica alliance of activists and rights workers. “The drama and the tragedy of those who are coming here to seek protection is not interesting to people any more,” she said.

Chrzanowska said national security was important, but called the focus on migrants as a threat a “far-right, racist narrative” that was not based in fact. She and other activists are now lonely voices speaking out for the human rights of those attempting to cross. The debate on migration in Poland, as in so many European countries, has shifted far to the right, and here the supposed link between migration and Russia makes the rhetoric all the more powerful.

Soldiers on patrol at the border with Belarus. Photograph: Jedrzej Nowicki/The Guardian

Ready to fight

In addition to the border wall, constructed by the previous government along much of the border with Belarus, the new “eastern shield” will involve trenches and fortifications along the length of the Belarus and Kaliningrad borders, to create a barrier against potential invasion.

But if war does come, it is most likely not to be the traditional kind that sees tanks rolling across the border. The shield will also include GPS towers and other technological installations, to protect against drone incursions.

In Gołdap, a town of about 15,000 people just a few kilometres from the border with Kaliningrad, locals were sanguine about having Russia on their doorstep. “The threat does influence the way you think, but to be honest I’d be more worried if I were living in Warsaw. Strategically, they’re not going to be targeting us here,” said Piotr Bartoszuk, 45, head of Gołdap’s vocational college.

In the early 2000s, local people would cross the border regularly, he said. Poles filled up with cheaper Russian petrol; the Russians took shopping or sightseeing trips. Now, the border is closed; buildings that once housed a bar and exchange booth lie abandoned and overgrown with long grass.

“Russia is definitely a threat, but not a huge one, because we’re in Nato, we’re protected, and I don’t think they’d just come at us out of the blue, the way they did with Ukraine,” said 15-year-old Kornelia Brzezińska, who hopes to join the army and is studying in the military track at the college.

Kornelia Brzezińska: ‘I wouldn’t abandon our nation – I’d defend it.’ Photograph: Jedrzej Nowicki/The Guardian

If the country were to be attacked, however, she would not hesitate to fight. “I’d go to the front. I really do love Poland. It’s not something I say lightly. I wouldn’t abandon our nation – I’d defend it,” she said.

Outside, on the walls of the college building, streaks gouged into the red brick by shrapnel were visible, left deliberately as a reminder of the devastation wrought on Poland by the second world war. There are few survivors of that war who remain alive today, but generational memories inform fears about the next potential war, particularly among older Poles.

As the training day at the military base outside Warsaw came to an end, Pruszko said he had also arranged for employees of his company to receive the same survival course.

“Many younger employees have grown up in the EU, in a time of peace, with little sense of the dangers us older generations remember. I hope we never need these skills, but I want them to know what to do if the moment ever comes,” he said