Germany has said it will send a group of soldiers to Poland to help with a project to fortify the country’s eastern border as worries mount about the threat from Russia.
Germany has announced that it will deploy a contingent of troops to Poland to assist in reinforcing the country’s eastern frontier amid rising concerns over potential threats from Russia.
Poland, a key backer of Ukraine in its conflict with Moscow unveiled plans in May last year to strengthen an extensive section of its eastern border which runs alongside Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. According to a spokesperson for Berlin’s defence ministry, the German soldiers will be tasked primarily with engineering work.
Their duties may involve building defensive structures, excavating trenches, installing barbed wire and setting up anti-tank obstacles, the spokesperson said on Friday.
“The support provided by German soldiers as part of (the operation) is limited to these engineering activities. “The spokesman did not specify the exact number of troops involved, saying only it would be a “mid-range two-digit number”.
They are expected to participate in the project from the second quarter of 2026 until the end of 2027.The spokesman stressed that parliamentary approval was not needed for the deployment as “there is no immediate danger to the soldiers from military conflicts”.
Except for certain exceptional cases, the German parliament has to approve the deployment of the country’s armed forces overseas. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Warsaw has staunchly backed Kyiv and been a transit route for arms being supplied by Ukraine’s Western allies.
Warsaw has also modernised its army and hiked defence spending. Germany is Ukraine’s second-biggest supplier of military aid after the United States and has sent Kyiv a huge quantity of equipment ranging from air defence systems to armoured vehicles.
With inputs from agencies
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