Speaking on TVN24, Kosiniak-Kamysz was asked whether the government had signals of Russian forces moving toward NATO borders — a question prompted by Prime Minister Donald Tusk's recent comment to the Financial Times that Russia could attack a NATO member within "months rather than years".
"Concrete examples from the last year and recent months" bore this out, the minister said, citing increasingly frequent violations of NATO member states' airspace, provocations over the Baltic Sea, GPS jamming, arson attacks across various countries, and sabotage operations.
"This all shows that Russia is heading not just toward provocation, but toward further-reaching aggression", he said, adding that the trajectory was "precisely mapped" and would continue.
Asked whether Tusk's remarks were "rhetoric or hard intelligence", Kosiniak-Kamysz said he could assure listeners they were "not purely an emotional statement meant to spur action".
The minister said he did not know of any country on NATO's eastern flank that could currently claim to be at peace. "We are not in a state of peace, we are not in a state of war — we are in a period between the two", he said, placing Sweden, Finland and the Baltic states in the same position.
On Tusk's suggestion that he sometimes had "certain problems" believing Article 5 of the NATO treaty still held firm, Kosiniak-Kamysz said the prime minister was voicing a U.S. expectation: "Europe, do more and take responsibility for your own defense". He warned that failure to do so risked Washington concluding that Europe had not met its obligations.
The minister also confirmed that last week's government crisis exercises — conducted under Poland's Homeland Defense Act and reported to have included President Karol Nawrocki — had gone "really well". He said cooperation between the president and prime minister in matters of the highest importance was both "possible and an obligation in times of threat", pointing to last September's nighttime drone incursion into Polish airspace as an example of when such coordination proved its worth.
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Source: PAP