JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
As President Trump tries to end the war in Ukraine, there is another country in the region doing all it can to prevent another Russian invasion. Poland shares a 500-mile border with Russia and Russian ally Belarus, and Poland is going beyond building up defenses. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Donald Tusk called on all Polish men to begin military training.
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PRIME MINISTER DONALD TUSK: (Non-English language spoken).
SUMMERS: The prime minister told Poland's Parliament in March that by the end of this year, every adult male in the country should be trained for war, NPR's Rob Schmitz reports.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
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ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: A military band marches in front of an unwavering row of Poland's newest soldiers, Dozens of men and women who have answered the call to volunteer to protect their country against Russia.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
SCHMITZ: Watching from the sidelines at this ceremony outside of Warsaw is Anita Milevski (ph), whose partner Dominique (ph) is about to take his oath to protect and serve.
ANITA MILEVSKI: (Non-English language spoken).
SCHMITZ: "How do I feel," asks Milevski nervously, glancing at her child who's holding her hand. "Joy, right? We're proud of him. This is a courageous step," she says. But as she fumbles for the right thing to say, tears well up in her eyes.
MILEVSKI: (Non-English language spoken).
SCHMITZ: "I'm emotional," she says, "and a little nervous. We live in difficult times, and I feel like more difficult times are coming. There's a need," she says, "for courageous people, tough people, and our Dominique is a rock. He's unbreakable."
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SCHMITZ: Dominique takes his oath, and the band plays the national anthem. Behind them stand a row of four Abrams tanks. After the ceremony, Dominique glances longingly at them.
DOMINIQUE: (Non-English language spoken).
SCHMITZ: "The past month of basic training was intense," he says. "We barely had time to rest. Now I'm staying on for specialized training. It's my dream to drive one of those tanks someday."
These soldiers, these tanks - they're all part of Poland's overhaul of its military. This year, the country will spend nearly 5% of its GDP on defense, more than any other NATO member, including the U.S. As a neighbor of Ukraine's and host to more than 2 million of its war refugees, Poland has seen, heard and felt what Russia is capable of, and it's now preparing for the worst.
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SCHMITZ: Hundreds of miles north of the capital, along Poland's border with Russia, bulldozers clear farmland for a land mine field while crews place neat rows of concrete anti-tank structures called hedgehogs that look like massive, gray Lego pieces. On a work break, Polish Lt. Ivona Misiasz (ph) gives me a tour of Poland's newly fortified border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. We peer into a deep ditch filled with water, and beyond that stand rows of hedgehogs that follow the curved border for as far as the eye can see. On the other side of the ditch, beyond a fence made of razor wire, is dense birch forest - Russia.
IVONA MISIASZ: (Non-English language spoken).
SCHMITZ: "We've learned from Ukraine's experience with Russia's invasion, and we've applied those lessons here," she says. "These hedgehogs are here so that our enemy breaks his teeth before he even thinks of biting us. And here," she says, pointing to a strip of land as wide as a football field, "is a space for a minefield."
Poland recently announced it was withdrawing from the Ottawa Convention, an international treaty banning the use of land mines.
MISIASZ: (Non-English language spoken).
SCHMITZ: "What we're seeing here," says Misiasz, "is what much of the 500-mile-long border between us and Russia and Belarus will someday look like - a very long ditch, columns of concrete hedgehogs and land mine fields. This," she says, "is going to be a lot of work."
Poland has set aside more than $2 billion to build this, and its treasury is buying up land from farmers along the border for this new initiative. But that's not all the action that's happening along this tense border.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Fire in the hole. Fire in the hole. Fire in the hole.
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SCHMITZ: Hundreds of miles east, along another stretch of the same border, U.S. soldiers conduct training exercises.
WILLIAM BRANCH: We have developed a strategy to encounter any kind of mass land grab or mass land invasion or incursion that would occur.
SCHMITZ: Lt. Col. William Branch is commander of the Forward Land Forces Multinational Group Poland, a group of a thousand U.S. soldiers at the Bemowo Piskie Training Area in northeastern Poland. His troops help defend NATO's eastern front along a stretch of land known as the Suwalki Gap, a corridor where military strategists say Russia would likely target if it were to attack NATO member states. Branch's soldiers have made visits to the nearby Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and along with Poland, he says...
BRANCH: There's a persistent theme in all of those visits. These countries are actively fighting to retain their sovereignty. They're actively fighting to continue to exist because there is a real threat that exists.
SCHMITZ: And while there is a real threat, agrees Mario Marszalkowski (ph), publisher of Defence24, a Warsaw-based security magazine, he says Russia's European neighbors have had time to prepare, drawing on years' worth of lessons from Ukraine to study how Russia wages war.
MARIO MARSZALKOWSKI: (Non-English language spoken).
SCHMITZ: "America is accustomed to quick, aerial wars," he says, "But Russia has retained its arsenal from the Soviet Union days. And that means," he says, "low-tech, land-based warfare is what Poland is focusing on defending itself against." But Marszalkowski says, the challenge now is figuring out President Donald Trump. Would the U.S. defend Poland if Russia attacked? He says Poland's government has handled this question in vague diplomatic terms but its actions, he says, show that it's beginning to look elsewhere for help.
MARSZALKOWSKI: (Non-English language spoken).
SCHMITZ: The Polish government, he says, sees hope in France, which has an extensive nuclear arsenal, and the terms under which it can use these weapons are different from Britain's, which require American consent before they deploy them. So from a security perspective, he says, France is a safer option from where to seek assistance. In the next few months, he says, Poland and France will sign big, strategic agreements of security cooperation that may include Poland's purchase of French air tankers, submarines and weaponry and may also include an agreement that Poland will now be inside France's protected nuclear umbrella. An agreement, he says, that could be as important as defense barriers along Poland's borders or a buildup of Poland's military. Anything, he says, to stop Russia.
Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Poland.
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