On the 105th anniversary of the Battle of Warsaw and Poland’s victory over Soviet forces in the summer of 1920, at the military parade in Warsaw, the President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, said yesterday that Russia is by no means invincible, since for more than three years now it has not been able to defeat Ukraine, but that in order to avoid war, Poland must have the strongest army in Europe.
“Today’s neo-imperialist Russia, which does not differ much from the Soviet Union, is not invincible. That is what the heroes of 1920 tell us. Security is in our hands. We must not miss a single week, a single month, to strengthen the potential of our army. We know that when a society does not want to pay for its own army, the day comes when it has to pay for someone else’s,” said Nawrocki at the military parade yesterday.
The Polish president proposed that he and the prime minister sign a new defense strategy for Poland that would not be subject to party interests and political disputes.
“It would include a declaration that we will defend every centimeter, every inch of Polish land, because Poland is one, and the Vistula line is not its border. In a short time, we should not be the third but the strongest army in Europe,” said Nawrocki.
The new Polish president said that the goal is 300.000 soldiers under arms, but he did not rule out half a million, which the Minister of Defense, Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, mentioned in recent days before him: that Poland, together with reservists, could have armed forces of half a million soldiers.
President Nawrocki yesterday called for a national decision to allocate five percent of GDP for defense, which would also make it possible to accelerate the development of the Polish navy.
“The Baltic has become an internal NATO sea. We must implement the Orka program and procure submarines that sailors have been waiting for for decades. A priority is also the ammunition factory in Poland. I believe that in a short time we will be able to produce one million pieces of 155 mm artillery ammunition and half a million pieces of tank ammunition annually,” said the Polish president.
The military parade on the boulevard along the Vistula, followed by a crowd of citizens, began with a parachutist landing who unfurled a large national flag.
The parade includes 4.000 soldiers from all branches of the Polish Armed Forces, among them 200 allied soldiers from the United States (U.S.), the United Kingdom (UK), France, Romania, and the Multinational Division North-East.
Along the Vistula appeared also the Polish military cavalry, which, recently, in addition to ceremonial purposes, the territorial defense forces in the east of the country began using for border protection with Belarus against illegal migration.
Yesterday, the army also presented Poles with modern weaponry acquired in recent years – 300 vehicles, among them U.S. Abrams tanks, German Leopard and Korean K2 tanks, Borsuk and Rosomak combat vehicles, the Patriot missile defense system, and the HIMARS artillery system.
Over the Vistula flew 50 combat aircraft of various types and helicopters, and on the Baltic Sea, near the Hel Peninsula, for the first time, a parallel parade of the Polish Navy was organized.
The Polish army celebrated August 15th and the Battle of Warsaw, often called the Miracle on the Vistula, as its day until 1947, when the holiday was moved so that communist Poland would not celebrate victory over its main post-war ally, over the Soviet Union and the halting of its army in its march to the West in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919 and 1920.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the new democratic authorities in 1992 restored the army holiday to the original date in honor of the victory over the Red Army.
After the military parade, the celebration of Army Day continues with a large military picnic organized for the people of Warsaw by the Ministry of Defense.
