Poland telling citizens to stock up on supplies

Poland will urge its citizens to stockpile at least three days’ worth of supplies to prepare for a war or other crisis, Deputy Interior Minister Wieslaw Lesniakiewicz has said.

It comes after a proposal by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to push through an €800 billion ($875 billion) military build-up intended to counter an alleged threat from Russia, something Moscow has dismissed as unfounded.

Each citizen needs to be able to survive at least three days with no help from the state in the event of war or another extreme situation, Lesniakiewicz said. He urged Poles to stockpile supplies such as water, medicine, food, and power banks. People should also get transistor radios for emergency communication when other methods are unavailable, he added.

Polish ministries will cooperate to publish a guide on preparing for crises, basing it on a similar publication released in Sweden, he said.

Late last year, Sweden began distributing booklets entitled ‘In case of crisis or war’. While the pamphlet has been republished multiple times since World War II, last year’s edition was twice as large as the previous one, supposed to address security fears over the Ukraine conflict. Finland, Norway, and Denmark have published similar resources to begin preparing their populations for a hypothetical war.

On Wednesday, Polish Deputy Defense Minister Pawel Bejda announced plans to mine the country’s borders with Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, citing concerns about a potential Russian attack. Up to a million anti-personnel landmines, previously banned by Warsaw, could be produced and used as part of the $2.6 billion ‘Eastern Shield’ project, Bejda said.

Moscow has repeatedly dismissed Western claims that Russia wants to attack NATO or the EU. Russian President Vladimir Putin has brushed off the scenario as “complete nonsense, total rubbish.”