According to Polish media, the country plans to spend 4.7% of its GDP on defence in 2025, up 0.6% from this year.
With the updated budget plan, Poland is already the largest defence spender in NATO, planning to spend 4.1% of GDP in 2024. However, the Polish government is considering increasing the defence budget by a further 0.6 percentage points next year.
This makes Warsaw the fifth largest contributor to NATO. Poland also hopes to transfer some of its expenditures to the EU budget, which would significantly relieve the national budget. The authorities argue that Poland shares the EU’s external border with Russia and war-torn Ukraine.
We are talking seriously with the EU about including some of these defence items in the EU budget because we are a frontline country, and we take responsibility for the entire EU.
The 2025 budget would be the first draft of the new government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, which replaced the previous conservative PiS party last December.
However, other sources report that the new Polish budget will have an even larger deficit than this year’s. Moreover, the European Commission recently opened an excessive deficit procedure against Warsaw.
Sadly, we have to start paying off the debts after PiS rule.
Meanwhile, Tusk reported that Warsaw could not hand over its MiG-29s to Kyiv until the allies delivered a substitute in 2026. In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the aid his country had received from Warsaw was huge but recently decreased, according to Wiadomości.
However, critics say that EU member states are taking advantage of the war in Ukraine to capitalise on the conflict, update their military stocks, and get rid of obsolete equipment, but European taxpayers are paying for all this.
