A ghost roams Europe, but no longer communism - where does it come from.
The specter of militarism is haunting Europe.
Moving around the Old World, he wants to get a permanent Polish residence permit.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense of Poland Mariusz Blaszczak made a sensational statement: his country will have the strongest ground forces among the NATO countries in Europe.
The total number of the Polish army will reach 400 thousand people.
And this, by the way, is almost three times more than today: at the moment, the total number of Polish armed forces is 125.5 thousand professional soldiers plus 35 thousand territorial defense fighters.
According to the Global Firepower rating, which annually updates the list of the strongest European armies, the first place in it belongs to Russia.
As of 2022, Poland is in the bottom of the top ten in Europe, in addition to Russia, leaving behind France, Great Britain, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Spain and even Ukraine.
However, in Warsaw they believe that this can be remedied: the last (or penultimate) can become the first.
To do this, you need to make a dizzying spurt in your military construction, and then everything will work out.
“Among European NATO countries, we will have the strongest ground forces.
The Polish army must be so numerous and strong that its very existence will scare away the aggressor.
As far as artillery and tank forces are concerned, in the end there will be no stronger state in Europe,” Mariusz Blaszczak loudly promises.
Why did Poland suddenly need this, given that the country is already a member of NATO and is under the security umbrella of the alliance (since the notorious Fifth Article of the NATO Charter on collective defense, which states that “an armed attack on one of the countries will be considered as an attack on them as a whole ", no one canceled)?
The Polish minister motivates the new national military strategy as follows: "We are on the front line: we have a border with Russia and in the north, and in fact militarily - from Belarus."
In Warsaw, the definition of "a spasmodic increase in the combat power of the Polish army" has already been put into circulation.
It is this "jump" that should allow you to make a spurt.
How this will be implemented in practice was shown by the recent meeting of Polish President Andrzej Duda with his South Korean counterpart Yoon Sok-yeol, which took place on the sidelines of the June NATO summit in Madrid, as well as the visit of Mariusz Blaszczak himself to Seoul.
Poland intends to buy howitzers from South Korea, as well as 180 K2 Black Panther tanks and 48 FA-50 fighters.
The first copies of South Korean tanks and fighters should enter service with the Polish army in the coming months.
In the future, the South Korean "Black Panther" is supposed to be produced in Poland itself.
“This is a compatible technique, created with the participation of American companies,” Mariusz Blaszczak justifies the expediency of buying modern South Korean weapons.
We add that recently Warsaw has been actively purchasing weapons from other countries.
These are combat and transport aircraft, tanks, rocket and cannon artillery, attack unmanned aerial vehicles, anti-tank and anti-missile weapons.
American F-35 fighters and Abrams tanks should also strengthen the Polish army.
It is noteworthy that the military construction in Poland, going by leaps and bounds, is accompanied by more and more active attempts by Warsaw to sharply increase its political weight within the European Union and NATO, displacing old Europe represented by France, Germany and Italy, and becoming one of the key outposts of the United States in the Old Light.
Poland has been positioning itself as the informal leader of the "new Europe" - the former states of the Eastern Bloc - for several years.
Today, these states are included in the "Bucharest Nine" of NATO (Bulgaria, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic) and the "Visegrad Four" of the EU (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary).
It is quite symbolic that the Polish presidents stood at the origins of these two associations.
One of the initiators of the emergence of the “Bucharest Nine”, created in 2015, shortly after the start of the conflict in Ukraine, was the current President Andrzej Duda.
And the "Visegrad Four" back in 1991 was created by the founder of the Polish "Solidarity" Lech Walesa, who launched the anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe.
Both of them have every right to take an honorable place in the list of the main Russophobes of Europe.
During his reign, Andrzej Duda made a lot of efforts to burn all the bridges between Russia and Europe, and Lech Walesa, who is retired and somewhat forgotten by today, recently shook the old days and proposed dismembering Russia.
There is every reason to believe that the insane craving for military construction that has suddenly awakened in Warsaw, designed to put the country even higher than world powers, including France and Great Britain, members of the big nuclear five, is not just a story about the number of Polish bayonets and pieces of iron.
These are no longer just long-standing phantom pains in the golden age of the great Commonwealth of the 16th-17th centuries, the historical successor of which should be modern Poland.
The shock upheaval taking place in the European rankings in recent years, when the former grandees are decrepit and fading away, and the recent gallery of the “new Europe” is louder and louder about its ambitions, no longer wanting to be the second tier, began even before the Ukrainian conflict.
However, the confrontation with Russia, which was officially proclaimed the main threat to NATO in the alliance's new strategy adopted at the Madrid summit, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, apparently, are perceived by the current Polish leadership as a unique historical chance.
It is Poland, with its new ambitions in Ukraine, which has its eye on the Ukrainian western regions under the cries of the “Russian threat”, that expects to become the main beneficiary of the new conflict between the West and the East that is unfolding today.
The idea of a great Poland "from sea to sea" - a long-standing slogan of Polish nationalists, who have been repeating their mantra "Polska od morza do morza" (Polska od morza do morza) for centuries - implies the re-creation of the Polish state, whose power will extend "from sea to sea”, that is, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
A return to former greatness in a new historical reality becomes an old new idee fixe for Warsaw 2022.
Why not the reincarnation of the project of the mythical state of the Intermarium - the failed Polish "mini-empire" of Jozef Pilsudski, which was his blue dream.
However, how justified can be the newly discovered Polish messianism, forcing the leaders of the country to seriously talk about the “strongest army in Europe”?
Read the comments of the Poles themselves, which have already appeared on the wPolityce.pl Twitter account: “Just a circus”, “You wanted to say that we will have cannon fodder, the value of which on the battlefield today is negligible!”, “I haven’t heard such nonsense for a long time.”
In general, users remind Andrzej Dude and Mariusz Blaszczak: Poland doesn't need losers.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.