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RZESZOW, Poland — Rows of U.S. surface-to-air missiles line the damp earth along the road leading to the regional airport — a stark reminder of how sensitive and strategic this once-quiet corner of NATO’s eastern flank has become to the multinational scramble to help Ukraine turn back Russian invaders.
The Polish backwater, about 60 miles from the Ukraine border, has been transformed into a buzzing international logistics hub for all kinds of aid flowing into Ukraine. The once-modest Rzeszow-Jasionka Airport became the center of a major international crisis overnight.
“No one expected that this place would play such a vital role in the whole situation of the war,” Michal Tabisz, the airport’s vice president, said on a drizzly afternoon shortly after the Russian war against its neighbor passed the 18-month mark.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, the airport handled about a dozen flights a day. Most were small aircraft.
Today, the airport rumbles beneath the wheels of NATO and civilian cargo planes from countries around the world. Its long runways are well suited for the massive aircraft of militaries from across the 31-nation bloc. Mr. Tabisz said more than 3,500 of the “wide body” planes have landed and taken off from the airport since February 2022 — a nearly inconceivable increase in activity.
SEE ALSO: Ukrainian refugees still finding refuge in Poland after 18 months of war
Half of the shift at the civilian-run airport is now dedicated to a swirl of military and humanitarian aid flights. The scene is a snapshot within a much wider album documenting the transformation that the war next door has thrust upon Poland.
As the biggest NATO ally bordering the war, the country of roughly 32 million has embraced the role of lead facilitator to the complex logistics surrounding the flow of weapons and other aid to Ukraine.
Poland has also absorbed more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees and processed an estimated 4 million more flowing toward Western Europe and beyond.
On the security front, Poland has responded to the war by beefing up its military.
The ruling conservative Law and Justice Party, which has governed the former communist bloc country since 2015, has vowed to spend nearly 4% of gross domestic product on defense in 2023. The figure would outstrip the U.S. ratio and soar past all other NATO nations, including Germany, Canada and France, each of which has yet to meet the alliance’s benchmark of 2% of GDP.
“We are undergoing enormous changes to our armed forces. We call it warp-speed transformation,” Gen. Wieslaw Kukula, commander in chief of the Polish armed forces, told a group of international journalists on a recent trip sponsored by the Polish Foreign Ministry.
The transformation aims to double the number of troops in the Polish military to 300,000. Gen. Kukula said the force is vital given the threat that Russia could expand its war eastward.
“The pace of people who want to join is outpacing the infrastructure we have for training them,” the general said.
He noted that Polish forces are responding to growing threats and instability from Russian ally Belarus, which shares a 250-mile-long border with Poland, and running a major training operation for Ukrainian forces ramping up a counteroffensive to drive back Russian occupiers.
“We’ve prepared roughly five [Ukrainian] brigades to fight,” Gen. Kukula said. The training mission is playing out largely in secret and involves the presence of troops from several other NATO nations, including the United States.
After long balking at the idea of a major U.S. troop deployment so close to Russia, the Pentagon upgraded the status of some 10,000 American troops in Poland in March by establishing a permanent U.S. Army garrison in the country, the first of its kind on NATO’s eastern flank.
Ordinary Poles are rallying in support of Ukraine. The sentiment is most palpable in Rzeszow, perhaps best known before the war for its sun-splashed cobblestone squares and confounding mix of monuments marking Poland’s complex history with Russia in all its incarnations over the centuries.
A giant concrete memorial commemorating the Soviet Red Army for driving German Nazis out of Poland in World War II looms over a central traffic circle in Rzeszow. The irony of a monument celebrating Moscow’s bygone achievement is not lost on the city.
“There was a push years ago to tear it down,” said a man passing the graffiti-marked base of the monument. “But we decided that would be too expensive, so we just left it.”
Aid hub
Polish finance officials estimated that Warsaw had spent more than $12 billion, roughly 2% of the country’s GDP, to support Ukraine since the start of the war. The European Commission has channeled funds from Western European nations into the Polish operation and other logistics hubs in Romania and Slovakia.
Poland has sent its own military equipment and humanitarian materials, and the flow of goods from dozens of other nations arriving on cargo planes in Rzeszow is loaded onto trucks and trains before heading into Ukraine.
No supply aircraft have flown into Ukraine in more than 18 months of war.
“Poland has become a huge humanitarian logistic hub for Ukraine,” said Michal Kuczmierowski, who heads the Polish government’s Strategic Reserves Agency, which carries the herculean burden of managing the flow of goods and support equipment for the international aid operation.
“The scale is absolutely huge,” Mr. Kuczmierowski told The Washington Times. “Our main goal is to push the help as quickly as possible.”
The pace has tapered in recent months as the war has ground to a near stalemate along the 600-mile front in the Ukrainian east. On busy days, as many as 400 trucks cross the border from Poland with weapons and other military hardware, pillows, sheets, clothing, food, power generators and water treatment systems.
For local officials in Podkarpackie province, which encompasses Rzeszow and other small cities along the border, the aid mission has simultaneously been defined by the needs of Ukrainian refugees — mainly women, children and older adults — forced to flee their homeland and settle in Poland.
“I think we all did not realize how much effort we needed and sort of output of energy that is required to face the challenge,” said Podkarpackie Gov. Ewa Leniart. She noted that 5 million Ukrainian refugees flooded the border in the first nine months of the war.
Rzeszow’s population of about 180,000 swelled to more than 350,000 in that period. Many thousands have returned to Ukraine or moved to other cities in Poland.
The Podkarpackie government scrambled in the early months to establish medical, clothing and food distribution centers set up by nongovernmental organizations such as Caritas Polska.
The Catholic charity said Poles had prepared more than 80,000 packages, including pasta, tea, canned goods, soap, toothpaste and other hygiene items for shipment into Ukraine, and 3.9 million food packages for refugees in Poland.
Podkarpackie also established a system of distributing cash allowances for refugee families who lost everything. As of August, the provincial government had paid out $26 million in allowances, Ms. Leniart said, and 59,375 refugees had registered to receive the financial support.
“The scale of work that we provided was huge,” she said. “It shows a huge effort of the Polish state or the Polish government to help the refugees from Ukraine, but also to provide help to those who stayed in Ukraine.”
Ms. Leniart acknowledged the squeeze on the government, which must maintain basic services for Polish citizens while increasing regional security amid constant fear that Russian operatives are active in Poland and eager to create upheaval in cities across Podkarpackie. An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that killed 19 people in recent days raised concerns, so far not corroborated, that Russian operatives had somehow spiked the local water system.
“There is no simple answer here. It’s a complex issue,” she said. “We’ve built a social resilience here, but we are very much worried and we need to stay watchful.
“We want to believe the war will finish very soon and that Ukraine will win,” Ms. Leniart said. “But Russia for sure will not surrender easily. The conflict will be long-term, and I cannot tell you how long it will take.”
Delicate operation
Ms. Leniart described the aid effort as a vital facet of the fight by Western democracies against Russia’s authoritarian military aggression, which she said is not limited to Ukraine.
“Russia has bad intentions not only toward Poland or the Baltic countries but also the aim is to destabilize Europe … [and] we cannot allow for that as a free world,” she said.
The West must stand together to ensure “the weak and sick mind of the authoritarian attitude is not successful,” she said.
The most sensitive piece of the aid effort involves the movement of military and other equipment deep into Ukraine.
The threat of Russian surveillance and sabotage is constant along ground supply routes from various points along Poland’s 329-mile-long border with Ukraine to areas of some of the most intense fighting in Ukraine’s south and east, including Bakhmut, where Ukrainian and Russian forces have been locked in combat for months.
One Polish official, speaking on the condition of anonymity with The Times given the sensitivity of the situation, described Rzeszow as a linchpin to military and humanitarian aid flows and said Russian subversion is a constant concern.
“We are delivering goods directly to the Ukrainian teams on the front lines,” the official said, and “we are taking care about security of the transport on the Polish side because we feel it is in the scope of the interest of Russian special forces.”
The official emphasized that Poland is closely cooperating with Ukrainian officials regarding where the most sensitive aid gets shipped. “We are defining ourselves as huge Ukrainian supporters and friends, but we, of course, identify the situation as a Russian and Ukrainian war, and we don’t want to engage Poland,” they said.
At the airport in Rzeszow, Mr. Tabisz described heightened security surrounding operations tied to the war.
He mentioned major cybersecurity investments at the airport but declined to comment on specific measures of NATO countries using the runways.
Mr. Tabisz chuckled when asked who controls the surface-to-air Patriot missile systems peppering the airport’s landscape. “The owners …,” he said. “We fully trust the services that are engaged here.”
He said the logistics of sustaining the flow of massive cargo flights — let alone coordinating communications with the many foreign nations backing the effort — has been challenging.
Before the war, Rzeszow-Jasionka managed landing, takeoff and refueling for about 20 medium-body 737s in an average week. The fuel needed for all of them was less than that required for one of the wide bodies now streaming through the airport daily.
Mr. Tabisz rattled off a list: “Dreamliner, C-17, A-400, A-330, B-767, B-747, B-777.”
The flights, both military and civilian, come “from across the world — I mean Europe, the U.S., Australia, Japan in terms of those engaged in the military things,” he said. A slate of humanitarian flights from nations such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have been added in the past year.
“Was I trained for this? No, I wasn’t,” said Mr. Tabisz, adding that the war gave Poland little choice but to respond the way it has.
“Everything we do helps the people on the front line stop the Russians,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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