Poland upgrades navy against Russia’s Baltic threat
Warsaw is spending billions to equip its long-neglected maritime defence forces with first submarines and frigates built in decades
Poland is undertaking the biggest overhaul of its navy since the cold war, building up long-neglected capabilities as Russia asserts itself in the Baltic Sea.
Warsaw is building three frigates at Gdynia on Poland’s northern Baltic coast and agreed to buy three Swedish submarines in November. It has also launched new minesweepers and started construction of a rescue ship to support submarine operations.
The acquisitions are intended to reverse decades of under-investment in the country’s navy, which operates one submarine, a Soviet-built vessel transferred to Poland in 1986, and two frigates built in the US in the 1970s.
Higher defence spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has mostly gone to the air force and the army, which is now the EU’s largest.
“The Russian threat is spreading and we cannot ignore now their hybrid warfare, as seen for example with the rupturing of cables,” said Paweł Bejda, Poland’s deputy defence minister. “Poland needs to be a very active participant in ensuring security in the Baltic Sea.”
Russia’s recent use of hybrid tactics has heightened concerns about Nato’s vulnerability in the Baltic Sea. While Russia’s Baltic fleet is based in neighbouring Kaliningrad, Poland and other states have accused Moscow of orchestrating sabotage attacks on undersea power and data cables, as well as launching drones that violated Nato’s airspace.
Nato allies have also intercepted some ships from Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of oil and cargo ships that Moscow has used to evade western sanctions. Swedish authorities boarded one cargo vessel under sanctions in December, and Baltic nations reported six suspicious cable incidents within six days earlier this month.
The three warships are being built under a €3.5bn partnership between PGZ, Poland’s state-owned defence group, and British defence manufacturer Babcock. The three submarines will be delivered by Sweden’s Saab for €2.3bn.
The navy had now switched “from zero to hero”, said Jan Grabowski, a board member of PGZ, which owns the Gdynia yard.
Poland is proportionally Nato’s biggest spender, with the equivalent of 4.7 per cent of GDP allocated to military expenditure in 2025. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent on acquiring mostly US and South Korean equipment for the land and air forces.
Following the cable incidents, Poland and its Baltic allies launched a new Nato mission to protect critical infrastructure, including the gas pipeline linking Norway via Denmark to Poland and offshore wind farms that Poland will start operating in 2026.
In September, Poland and Sweden staged their first-ever joint military drill in the Baltic. A month later, the Polish government drafted legislation granting navy commanders broader powers to use military force against threats.
“I’m very happy that the weather has changed and the wind is now blowing for the navy,” said Commodore Piotr Skóra, a senior officer who now oversees naval procurement within the defence ministry.
Skóra said Poland’s navy would have benefited from earlier investments but he argued that being late offered some advantages, including access to newer technology and the ability to avoid manufacturing problems encountered by others. Poland’s frigates are based on the design for the British Type 31 frigates, for which Babcock booked a £90mn loss in 2024 owing to design changes and cost overruns.
“I’m very thankful to the British because they were open and shared the mistakes they made so that we would be able to avoid them,” said Skóra.
Poland’s two existing frigates were donated by Washington to Warsaw more than two decades ago after the US navy decommissioned them.
The three frigates being made in Gdynia are scheduled to enter service between 2029 and 2031, reviving a shipyard that came close to bankruptcy, according to PGZ executives, after Poland scrapped an earlier frigate programme because of funding problems. Instead, the yard spent 17 years building a single patrol vessel, the Ślązak.
Thanks to the latest investment, the shipyard was “growing like a phoenix from the ashes”, said Grabowski.
Babcock had deepened its partnership with PGZ to align Gdynia’s capabilities with those of the UK shipyard in Rosyth where the British Type 31 frigates were being assembled, according to Mark Goldsack, a senior Babcock executive.
He predicted smoother and faster production in Gdynia thanks to the experience gleaned at Rosyth. “The first product that goes down the line tests the whole system,” Goldsack said. If Gdynia can now “learn all our lessons, they’ve just massively shortened the development cycle”.
Grabowski attributed Poland’s long neglect of its navy in part to geography, noting that politicians and military commanders were based in Warsaw, more than 300km from Poland’s coast.
“I think the distance was quite long when it comes to sending the message about what is important” for the navy, he said.
The frigate programme also comes as the UK and Poland aim to sign a new bilateral defence agreement in the coming months, after UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer launched talks during a visit to Warsaw last January.
The head of the Royal Navy, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, told the FT that Russia’s elite deep-sea sabotage unit was poised to deploy submersibles capable of damaging British seabed cables and pipelines.
While the politicians negotiated their bilateral agreement, Babcock’s Goldsack said: “It’s got to be to both countries’ advantages to have more than one shipyard that can operate on the same class of ships.”