Will Poland Refurbish Israeli Patriots for Ukraine War?
Czech, Polish, and Slovenian PMs travel to Kyiv in 2022
In June, rumors swirled in the media that the Biden administration was holding discussions with Israel and Ukraine about the possibility of transferring aging Patriot air defense systems currently in Israel to Ukraine. The CNN reported: “The systems would likely need to be transferred to the US first, where they would undergo refurbishment, before being sent to Ukraine.”
In April, the Israel Defense Forces said it would soon “retire its Patriot systems,” as noted by the Financial Times, though the report elided providing a valid reason for scraping the much-touted air defense system. Since then, a gag order appears to have been issued on reporting about military co-operation between Israel and Ukraine, as it is a sensitive and strictly off-limits topic.
Russian news agency Sputnik reported on August 12 that Poland had signed an agreement on the production of 48 launchers of the Patriot surface-to-air missile system, United States Ambassador to Poland Mark Brzezinski claimed on Monday during the signing ceremony.
Under a deal worth $1.23 billion (4.7 billion zloty), the M903 launch stations will be produced at Stalowa Wola steelworks in Poland in co-operation with US defense giant Raytheon Technologies Corp. for which the US approved a $2 billion defense loan to Poland last month. The air defense systems production will run through 2027-2029.
The US has been increasingly looking to outsource production of the systems, with a joint US-Japan project hitting a stumbling block in July, the report noted, though it failed to clarify how Poland’s primitive defense production industry would produce launchers for advanced Patriot missile systems when it could hardly produce 155 mm artillery shells that Ukraine, under the patronage of the US, had to import from a number of European and Asian countries during the two-year-long war.
Clearly, a behind-the-scenes understanding has been reached that instead of refurbishing “aging Israeli Patriot systems” in the US, the launchers would instead be transferred to Poland where they would be refurbished under the supervision of Raytheon’s technicians and then deployed in the Ukraine War.
During the two-year conflict, Israel’s thriving military-industrial complex has provided plenty of weapons, specifically its cutting-edge drone and missile technology, to Ukraine, but mainstream media, on the instructions of the US security establishment, has been especially careful not to report on the “sensitive topic.”
Instead, Western media bent over backwards to publish misleading reports at the beginning of the Ukraine War that Ukraine’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded for Iron Dome missile interceptors, a risible request that Israel allegedly “contemptuously rebuffed,” after which the Zelensky regime had a fictitious spat with Israeli policymakers.
The clear objective of creating this smokescreen around clandestine military co-operation between Washington’s servile surrogates, Ukraine and Israel, was in deference to Israel’s regional security interests. Because Israel frequently mounts airstrikes on Iran-backed militant groups in Lebanon and Syria, whereas Russia has deployed troops, aircraft and S-400 air defense system at Syria’s Mediterranean coast. If Russia gets even an inkling of Israel’s military assistance to Ukraine, then Israel would have to rethink its belligerent attitude.
Nonetheless, besides pledging to refurbish Israeli Patriot missile launchers for Ukraine, Poland also inked a bilateral security agreement with Ukraine on July 8. Among other substantial commitments, the security agreement signed in Warsaw provided for the development of a mechanism for Poland to shoot down Russian missiles and drones fired in the direction of Poland in Ukrainian airspace, which would legally amount to an unequivocal declaration of war between a NATO member state, Poland, and Russia.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky during a joint press conference with Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk stated: “We are especially grateful for the special arrangements, and this is reflected in the security agreement. It provides for the development of a mechanism to shoot down [by Poland] Russian missiles and drones fired in the airspace of Ukraine in the direction of Poland. I am confident that our teams and the teams of the ministries of defense, together with our military, will work together to work out how we can quickly implement this point of our agreements.”
The vendetta between Russia and Poland, clearly punching above its weight, goes a long way back. In a highly symbolic move expressing solidarity with Ukraine, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled together to the embattled Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 15, 2022, weeks after Russia’s intervention in February.
The “Three Musketeers” took hours-long train trip on their journey from the west Ukrainian city of Lviv to the capital Kyiv, allegedly “endangering their lives” due to security risks involved in traveling within a war zone, though there was no risk to their lives, as such, because they had requested prior permission for the official visit from the Kremlin, which was graciously granted keeping in view diplomatic conventions.
Accompanying the trio of premiers was a “special guest” of the Zelensky regime, Jaroslaw Kaczynski—then the deputy prime minister of Poland, the head of Law and Justice (PiS) Party to which the president and prime minister of Poland belonged and the infamous “puppet master” who hired and fired government executives and ministers on a whim.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski is the twin brother of late President Lech Kaczynski, who died in a plane crash at Smolensk, Russia, in 2010 along with 95 other Poles, among them political and military leaders, as they traveled to commemorate the Katyn massacre that occurred during the Second World War.
Subsequent Polish and international investigations led by independent observers conclusively determined that the crash-landing was an accident caused by fog and pilot error. Still, Kaczynski had long suspected that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a role in provoking the accident, and was harboring a personal grudge against the Russian president.
The Polish electorate dispensed poetic justice to kingmaker Kaczynski as he was ousted from power following the last October’s parliamentary elections in Poland due to his myopic and vindictive policies and Donald Tusk was elected prime minister of the coalition government.
Tusk is a seasoned politician and diplomat who was the President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019. It was expected of him to display statesmanship and revisit the confrontational approach of his predecessors. But clearly, he is going down the same path of perdition that proved fatal not only for egocentric and spiteful politicians but for the Poles as a nation.
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