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  • 4 months ago
Is Poland ready to face a possible Russian attack after drones entered its airspace? Mateusz Mazzini, Foreign Affairs Commentator, answers.

Transcript
00:00And let's just talk about that a little bit more, because what you just basically said to me is Putin is testing NATO.
00:07And this is something that a lot of analysts are also saying that Ukraine is Poland's next door neighbor.
00:15How right now is Poland preparing when it comes to dealing with a possible attack or like today being caught up in this crossfire between Russia and Ukraine?
00:28We do know that Poland's economy has been on a war footing.
00:32But is the country prepared for anything that could happen when it comes to Russia?
00:38I actually think all due respect that this is ill suited to say that this was an incident of crossfire.
00:43This was a deliberate action on behalf of the Russian Federation to invade the Polish airspace and send drones on the Polish territory, four of which were shot down.
00:51So I'm more than certain that the officials in the Kremlin are perfectly aware of what they're doing.
00:58And coming back to your initial question, to what extent Poland or any other NATO member state, for that matter, is prepared for this kind of conflict?
01:06I think we need to remember that Russia has been waging hybrid war or using hybrid measures against eastern NATO member states for over a decade, if not longer.
01:18And we might not be very well prepared to counter drone attacks.
01:22And in fact, this proves my point that if a NATO member state is restored to using very costly F-35 jets that are scrambled to shut down cheap sort of tinport quality Russian drones,
01:38that means that we haven't learned our lesson from Ukraine.
01:41Ukraine doesn't have F-35s, doesn't have defense systems as sophisticated as Poland or Estonia or Lithuania or NATO, for that matter.
01:49Yet they're shooting hundreds, if not thousands of those every day and every week.
01:54So there's a lesson, very important, very vital to be learned from how Ukrainians have been dealing with that kind of threat.
02:01But we also need to remember that Russia has been trying all sorts of different instruments coming out of their authoritarian playbook, cyber attacks, setting shopping malls on fire, recruiting civilians to carry on sabotage attacks.
02:16And this has been going on for a decade, if not more.
02:20So a certain level of resilience or at least awareness is deeply embedded in the Polish nation right now.
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