Updated May 14, 2025 at 11:55 AM PDT
BRANIEWO, Poland — A military band marches in front of a row of Poland's newest soldiers, dozens of men and women who have answered the call to volunteer to protect their country against Russia.
Watching from the sidelines at this ceremony outside Warsaw is Anita Milewski, whose partner, Dominik Milewski, is about to take his oath to protect and serve.
"How do I feel?" Milewski says, glancing at her child, who's holding her hand. "Joy, right? We're proud of him. This is a courageous step," she says, tears welling up in her eyes. "I'm emotional, and a little nervous," she adds. "We live in difficult times, and I feel like more difficult times are coming. There's a need for courageous people, tough people, and our Dominik is a rock. He's unbreakable."
Dominik Milewski takes his oath, and the band plays the Polish national anthem. Behind them stands a row of four U.S.-made Abrams tanks.
"The past month of basic training was intense," he says after the ceremony. "We barely had time to rest. Now I'm staying on for specialized training. It's my dream to drive one of those tanks someday."
These soldiers and tanks are part of Poland's overhaul of its military. This year, the country will spend nearly 5% of its gross domestic product on defense — more than any other NATO member, including the United States. As President Trump tries to end the war in Ukraine, Poland is doing all it can to prevent another Russian invasion. As a neighbor of Ukraine and host to more than 2 million of its war refugees, Poland has seen, heard and felt what Russia is capable of, and it is now preparing for the worst.
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Poland also shares a 500-mile border with Russia and Kremlin ally Belarus, and it is not only building up defenses there. This year, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called on all Polish men to begin military training, announcing to parliament in March that by the end of this year, the aim is for every adult male in the country to be trained in the event of war.
Hundreds of miles north of the capital, along Poland's border with Russia, bulldozers clear farmland for a land mine field while crews place neat rows of concrete anti-tank structures called hedgehogs that look like massive gray Lego pieces.
On a work break, Polish Lt. Iwona Misiarz gives a tour of the country's newly fortified border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. She peers into a deep ditch filled with water and, beyond that, gazes upon rows of anti-tank barriers — hedgehogs — that follow the curved border for as far as the eye can see. On the other side of the ditch, beyond a razor-wire fence, is dense birch forest: Russia.
"We've learned from Ukraine's experience with Russia's invasion, and we've applied those lessons here," Misiarz says. "These hedgehogs are here so that our enemy breaks his teeth before he even thinks of biting us."
Poland recently announced it was withdrawing from the Ottawa Convention, a 1997 international treaty banning the use of land mines.
Misiarz points to an undulating strip of land about as wide as a football field. "What we're seeing here," Misiarz says, "is what much of the 500-mile-long border between us and Russia and Belarus will someday look like: a very long ditch, columns of concrete hedgehogs and land mine fields. This is going to be a lot of work."
Poland has set aside more than $2 billion to build this border barrier, and its treasury is buying up land from farmers along the borders with both Russia and Belarus for this initiative.
But that's not all the action happening along this tense border. Hundreds of miles east along another stretch of the same border, U.S. soldiers conduct training exercises, setting off a live explosive before surveying the scene.
"We have developed a strategy to counter any kind of mass land grab or mass land invasion or incursion that would occur," says U.S. Army Lt. Col. William Branch, commander of the forward land forces multinational group Poland, a group of 1,000 U.S. soldiers at the Bemowo Piskie training area in northeastern Poland.
Branch's troops help defend NATO's eastern front, along a stretch of land known as the Suwalki Gap, a narrow corridor of borderland between Poland and Lithuania where Kaliningrad and Belarus are closest to one another. Military strategists say it is a region that Russia would likely target if it were to attack NATO member states.
Branch's soldiers have made visits to the nearby Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, also NATO members. "There is a persistent theme in all of those visits," he says. "These countries are actively fighting to retain their sovereignty. They're actively fighting to continue to exist because there is a real threat that exists."
Mariusz Marszalkowski, publisher of Defence24, a Warsaw-based security magazine, says Russia's European neighbors have had time to prepare, drawing on years' worth of lessons from Ukraine to study how Russia wages war. "America is accustomed to quick aerial wars," he says, "but Russia has retained its arsenal from the Soviet Union days, and that means low-tech, land-based warfare is what Poland is focusing on defending itself against."
But Marszalkowski says the challenge now is figuring out Trump — and whether the United States would defend Poland if Russia attacked. Marszalkowski says Poland's government has handled this question in vague diplomatic terms, but its actions, he says, show that it's beginning to look elsewhere for help.
"The Polish government sees hope in France, which has an extensive nuclear arsenal, and the terms under which it can use these weapons are different from Britain's, which require American consent before they deploy them," Marszalkowski says. "So from a security perspective, France is the safer option from where to seek assistance."
In the next few months, he says, Poland and France will sign big strategic deals on security cooperation that may include Poland's purchase of French air tankers, submarines and weaponry, and may also include an agreement that Poland will now be inside France's protective nuclear umbrella. That could be as important as defense barriers along Poland's borders or a buildup of Poland's military, he says. "Anything," he says, "to stop Russia."
Grzegorz Sokol contributed reporting from Poland.
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