Poland plans to restart domestic production of anti-personnel mines with a view to producing up to a million of the weapons to fortify its borders with Russia and Belarus, a deputy defense minister has said.
Paweł Bejda’s statement comes after Poland and the Baltic states announced plans to withdraw from the Ottawa Convention, which bans anti-personnel mines.
Leaving the 1997 treaty, which has been ratified or acceded to by more than 160 nations but not by Russia, will allow Poland and the three Baltic countries to start stockpiling landmines again.
Bejda said Poland had “no choice” but to withdraw from the convention as his country faced a “very real and very serious threat” at its frontiers with Belarus and Russia.
He added that bolstering defenses was part of Warsaw’s ‘Eastern Shield’ project to reinforce its section of NATO’s eastern flank.
In an interview with the RMF24 news site on Tuesday, Bejda said Poland does not currently have anti-personnel mines but has the capacity to produce them.
He said mine production would be undertaken by both state-owned and private defense contractors, adding that the production potential needs to be boosted.
He added that state-owned arms producer PGZ would be involved in a drive to produce “several hundred thousand, we can say a million” anti-personnel mines, and that this would take eight or nine months.
Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz has said withdrawal from the Ottawa Convention will have to be approved by the country’s Cabinet, parliament and president, and end with a notification to the United Nations, following which the procedure could take around six months, the Defense News website reported.
