Captain Obvious is an American cartoon hero. In Poland, however, he’s now being set up for prosecution on charges of treason for saying the obvious. That, according to the new Polish government and the US Ambassador in Warsaw, Mark Brzezinski, must not be allowed to be said.

Instead, the Polish Captain O has said that Poland cannot defend itself from a combined Russian-Belarusian attack, and cannot count on the United States and other NATO allies to save it in time.

Although the Polish General Staff knows this, and so do Poland’s presidency, prime ministry and Sejm (parliament), the Warsaw directorate aims to pay the US, NATO allies, and South Korea more than thirty billion dollars in protection money for Polish, US and NATO readiness in defence of the impossible. From time to time, one of the fantasies of Polish officials is to draw US nuclear weapons on to Polish territory for premium insurance against the Russian invasion risk. President Andrzej Duda last said as much three months ago.

That Poland won’t survive a US-fired nuclear weapon from the Redzikowo base, northwest of Warsaw, is also obvious. Not allowing this to be said is the script, not of Captain Obvious (Kapitan Oczywiste) but of Captain Oblivious (Kapitan Nieświadomy).

Mariusz Blaszczak (lead image), a small town politician by career, was Poland’s Defense Minister from 2018 to 2023; before that he was the minister in charge of the security agencies and Border Guard as Minister of the Interior and Administration. He has been elected to the Sejm for five terms as a leading figure of the Law and Justice (PiS) party. When the PiS lost the election of last October, Blaszczak lost his ministerial power and went back to the parliament’s opposition benches.

During his term in office, Poland had tripled its defence spending to 94 billion zloty ($24 billion), amounting to almost 4% of the national GDP, the largest military commitment of the entire alliance, speaking relatively, exceeding even the US. From the US, Blaszczak signed for purchases of the Patriot air defence system, HIMARS rocket launchers, F-35 combat aircraft, Abrams tanks, and other military materiel, funded by $4 billion in Pentagon loans. That is a small fraction of the total money outlay Blaszczak committed Poland to pay – the Patriots alone cost $15 billion; the F-35s, $4.6 billion; Abrams tanks, $1.5 billion; and HIMARS systems up to $10 billion. More tanks and artillery from South Korea have been paid for and deliveries commenced at a price tag of almost $6 billion. Aircraft and other weapons from Sweden are going to cost about $100 million.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/.
See also https://notesfrompoland.com/

Blaszczak has publicly called this militarization of the Polish economy and the unprecedented military spending a deterrent against Russia. Notwithstanding, every one of the US weapons which has been deployed on the Ukrainian battlefield and which the Poles have bought, has been defeated already by superior Russian weapons. This hasn’t been missed by Poland’s General Staff.

Infighting between the generals, the intelligence agencies, and government ministers has been fierce as the Ukraine war has headed towards defeat. Just days before last October’s national vote, Blaszczak went on Twitter to reveal parts of a classified military report exposing the General Staff view that Poland could not withstand a Russian offensive. They were planning instead, Blaszczak said, to concede the eastern half of the country, and to form a national defence line on the Vistula River.

Blaszczak’s birthplace and parliamentary constituency of Legionowo, a suburb of Warsaw, is east of the Vistula line, and would be lost in the General Staff’s war plan. The town had been occupied by the Russian Army in the 1890s; recovered from the Red Army in 1920; lost to the German Army in World War II; lost again to the Red Army during the Vistula-Oder Offensive of 1945.

Blaszczak’s leak of the classified documents was an election-eve promotion for himself and the PiS party.

In his video film dated September 17, 2023, Blaszczak said “the government of [Donald] Tusk was ready to give up half of Poland in the event of war”. Tusk, who was prime minister from 2007-14, was the leader of the Civic Platform (PO) opposition, and on October 15 he won enough new votes to form a coalition of minority parties to recover the government; Tusk became prime minister again on December 13. Since then he and the PO have gained in the polls while the PiS has been losing ground.

Blaszczak’s vulnerability to PO attack has grown in tandem.

Blaszczak’s film was broadcast on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 which came two weeks after Germany had invaded from the west, with Moscow and Berlin then dividing the country between them. In Blaszczak’s broadcast, the minister showed images of a dossier from 2011, marked as “top secret” and signed by the then-PO defence minister Bogdan Klich, relating to the defence of Poland in the case of an invasion from the east. According to the dossier, Poland’s General Staff had run a simulation of an attack on the country from the east. Polish defences were supposed to hold out for 22 days, but in fact “the war was lost within five days and the Polish army ceased to exist.”

“[The analysis] assumed that the stand-alone defence of the country would last a maximum of two weeks, and after seven days the enemy would reach the right [east] bank of the Vistula,” said Błaszczak. “The documents clearly show that Lublin, Rzeszów and Łomża could have been the Polish Bucha,” Blaszczak claimed, referring to the fabricated allegation of Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian town of Bucha in September 2022.

“The PiS has changed this and will defend every piece of Poland,” Blaszczak added. “[Poland] will become the most powerful land force in Europe.” The electioneering was obvious. The General Staff report of 2011 was also obvious, especially so after the Russian Army had demonstrated its near-total battlefield superiority over the weapons Blaszczak was buying for Poland’s defence.

The reaction from the Polish military and the PO was to accuse Blaszczak of treason, and to threaten that if they won the October election, they would move in parliament to strip him of his legal immunity and indict him in court for “declassifying top secret documents for electoral purposes”.

Early this month in a Sejm vote of 245 to 181, Blaszczak lost his immunity from prosecution. Other former PiS ministers were also stripped of their immunity; one was then arrested and handcuffed on national television. That action was reversed last week in Warsaw in an embarrassment for Tusk and his law officials.

As Pentagon loyalists go, Blaszczak exceeded his Polish predecessors, even the Greeks. “Dear Lloyd. It’s my pleasure to be in Washington to see you again to discuss the Polish-American defence cooperation,” Blaszczak told General Lloyd Austin, US Defense Secretary, at the Pentagon door on May 5, 2023. “Now Marius,” Austin said, “I know that you are deeply dedicated to making the security ties between our country even stronger…You know, two weeks ago, we were at Ramstein [Germany] at the most recent meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, and Poland was once again a leader in helping Ukraine increase its military capabilities. In fact, without Poland’s tremendous contributions we would never have been able to do as much for Ukraine after Russia’s indefensible invasion.”

Left, Blaszczak (PiS) and Austin, May 5, 2023. Right, Radoslaw Sikorski, PO foreign minister and ex-British national with a wife, Anne Applebaum, who is a US as well as Polish passport holder.

At the same time, as Polish political analyst Stanislas Balcerac has pointed out, US Ambassador Brzezinski was working in Warsaw to replace Blaszczak and his PiS government with even more fervid loyalists like former PO Defense Minister, now Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski.

Balcerac comments on the treason case against Blaszczak. “Last year the Americans kicked out the PiS, the most pro-American government in continental Europe. That undoubtedly created frustration for politicians like Blaszczak. After all, he had made frequent pilgrimages to Washington to buy US military hardware, only to be given a kick in the butt. Whatever is being said in the Polish political quarrels, the defence situation of Poland is bleak; it is unable even to defend its border with Belarus. Moreover, cracks in the military are visible on a day-to-day basis: several soldiers died recently on Polish exercise grounds. A few days ago, a training jet [M-346] with a highly experienced pilot crashed in Gdynia; the pilot died. In 2022 Polish state audit chamber NIK had written that half of those M-346 aircraft were not operational.”

Last week, the Moscow military analyst Yevgeny Krutikov published an essay interpreting the Blaszczak case from the point of view of the Russian General Staff and Russian military intelligence. The essay which appeared in Vzglyad on July 18 has been translated verbatim; illustrations have been added. Read the original here.

Source: https://vz.ru/world/2024/7/18/1278089.html

July 18, 2024
How the Polish Defense Minister gave secrets to Russian military intelligence
By Yevgeny Krutikov

The secret plan drawn up in Poland in case of an “attack from Russia” was given to the enemy not by anyone, but by the country’s defense minister himself. At least, Polish counterintelligence makes such accusations against Mariusz Blaszczak. How exactly did this happen and how serious is the leak of classified information?

The Polish Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW) has notified the prosecutor’s office of suspicion of commission of a crime by ex-Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak. He is charged with making public part of the secret action plan of the Polish armed forces in case of an “attack from Russia.” “The revealed violations in the sphere of improper handling of classified information and actions to the detriment of the interests of protecting classified information constitute crimes provided for in chapters XXXIII and XXIX of the Criminal Code,” the counterintelligence agency said in a statement.

Now Blaszczak is a deputy of the Sejm from the Law and Justice Party (PiS). He is not a military man, but a typical European politician who started as a municipal deputy in his native northern Warsaw suburb of Legionowo and eventually became Lech Kaczynski’s right-hand man in the PiS party. According to the results of the last elections to the Sejm, the PiS party turned into an opposition one. And Donald Tusk’s supporters began an active hunt for their rivals, especially those who annoyed them personally or too loudly.

The other day, at the request of the representative of the former operational commander of the Armed Forces, General Tomasz Piotrowski (right), the Sejm lifted parliamentary immunity from Blaszczak, after which the news arose about the initiation of the investigation against him by military counterintelligence. The Polish generals are now considered the most offended by Blaszczak, whom, while he was holding the post of head of the Ministry of Defense, he accused of cowardice and incompetence.

The essence of the matter is that last year, during the election campaign to the Sejm in a campaign video of the PiS party, then-Minister Blaszczak unveiled the Warta plan [Варта, Plan West ], developed at the General Staff of the Polish Army. Blaszczak, as Minister of Defense, declassified this plan by his own order, just in order to use it in election campaign materials. To what extent he had the right to do so, the investigation should establish.

Sensational in this regard was his main strategic idea. In the hypothetical event of an attack by Russia and Belarus on Poland, the Polish army had to retreat to the defensive line of the Vistula River along the line of the fortified areas (bridgeheads), Grudzendz-Torun-Bydgoszcz and Otwock– Garwolin– Ryki. The Polish army was supposed to hold the defence there for 10 to14 days, waiting for help from other NATO countries. And if help from NATO does not come or something goes wrong? There was no answer to this question in the declassified plan.

Thus, the General Staff of the Polish Army proposed in advance and without a fight, to surrender the eastern half of Poland’s territory, withdraw to Warsaw, and hang on to the natural barrier, the Vistula River. By origin, this plan is a reflection from as early as 1939, when the Polish army, contrary to proposals from Paris and London, took the fight to the advancing Germans right on the border. And it was quickly defeated.

Plan West – the map of disposition of German (red) and Polish forces (blue) in August 31, 1939; click on original to enlarge. Plan East, compiled by the Polish Army at the same time, assessed the likely movement of the Soviet forces from the east. Read more detail here.

Poland’s borders at the end of Red Army operations, German capitulation, and negotiations between the allies. 1945-51.

After the end of World War II, military theorists, primarily Anglo-Saxon ones, declared that this plan was erroneous. From their point of view, the plan of withdrawal from the border and defence along the Vistula River (only from the other side) and around the fortified industrial areas of Warsaw, Modlin, Krakow and Katowice, looked more promising for defence. This could give time for Britain and France to deploy troops in time. A few years ago, the Polish General Staff transferred this idea to modern conditions, changing the west to the east.

The publication of the details of this plan, primarily geographical, angered a number of retired Polish generals. In their opinion, the publication of the plan gives unnecessary information to Russian military intelligence. Then, however, domestic political considerations arose.

The fact is that the Plan West provided for the surrender of the eastern territories of Poland whose population is considered very conservative, with traditional, Catholic, and rural thinking. They are the Polish equivalent of rednecks, if such a comparison is appropriate. The population of these territories is, to be precise, the core electorate of the PiS party. The urbanized and westernized western part of the country with Warsaw, which the Plan West was supposed to defend, votes for Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party.

The message of Mariusz Blaszczak’s election video was addressed precisely to this [eastern] electorate of the PiS party. Liberals and pro–Europeans from Donald Tusk’s party are ready to sacrifice you – “real Poles” – and are not going to protect you at the strategic level. In this context, the Plan West, developed in 2011 during Tusk’s incumbency, represented himself and the Civic Platform party as something like national traitors.

From the point of view of the electoral dynamics, the move was successful, although Tusk’s party still won with the support of Warsaw and other major cities in the west of the country. But in the end, Blaszczak’s act radically undermined Poland’s credibility within NATO.

Not all NATO member countries have such “national defense” plans at the headquarters level, but those who have them must coordinate them with the NATO command. Or at least they exchange ideas about them. And now both NATO and the Polish military community have asked the question: how is it that in Warsaw, for the sake of an election campaign, it is possible to publish a strategic plan agreed with NATO? And what other pan-European or NATO secrets can Polish politicians make public?

No intelligence is needed here — the Poles are coping on their own. The former mayor of a sleepy Warsaw suburb is not the most obvious candidate for the post of defense minister of a major country in Europe. But this is how the parliamentary system works, not only in Poland, when an internal party career elevates individuals to government posts who are clearly not fitted for them.

Another topic for conversation is that Tusk and his team have actively begun to clean out their political opponents, including those who were or are in the army and special services. In this context, we can wish the Poles an intensification of their political struggle. It is possible that in the process many more documents of interest to Russian military intelligence will be found.