How Poland is preparing for war with Putin: DAVID JONES heads to Russian border – and finds evidence of previously unreported drone attack on nation whose memory of Stalin’s savagery is steeling them for new conflict

The field behind Jan Michalak’s farmhouse hosts a magnificent stand of giant sunflowers, and every weekend he cuts some of them down to decorate the grave of his wife, Danuta, who died four years ago.

Last Saturday, however, the 66-year-old wheat grower noticed that a large patch of the flower bed had been flattened. 

When he went to investigate, he found the wreckage of a strange object entangled with the crushed stalks and petals.

With its sharply angled 3ft wings, it looked to Mr Michalak as though ‘a miniature rocket had crashed’ on his land, just a dozen miles from Poland‘s border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad: one of the world’s most heavily militarised regions.

But the chilling reality dawned when he fetched his daughter-in-law, Patrycja, who had been following the news more assiduously than him. 

From television pictures, she recognised the mangled object as one of the Russian drones sent into Polish airspace a few days earlier, with the evident intention of testing the country’s preparedness for an attack.

Her assertion was confirmed by the serial number etched in its grey fuselage. Poland uses the Roman alphabet, but the letters it contained were Cyrillic.

Mr Michalak raised the alarm and scores of military personnel, police and firemen converged on the farm, in the remote hamlet of Studzieniec, 190 miles north of Warsaw, where they found more bits of the shattered drone strewn across the field.

Beyond Poland, this discovery has gone largely unreported, for this drone was assumed to have been another among the barrage of at least 19 that appeared in Poland’s night skies on September 10.

Yet there is something about this incursion that makes it even more worrying than the others.

Mr Michalak’s son, Sebastian, 33, who runs the farm, tells me that he and his wife picked sunflowers in this same field, on Sunday, September 14, four days after Vladimir Putin’s outrageous violation, but they didn’t see the flattened patch or the drone.

He has no doubt they would have done so if the crash had occurred before then. This begs a vital question. Did Putin secretly order a second drone foray into Poland, at least four days after the first?

Sebastian believes so, and he repeated his story to the Polish authorities during a 90-minute debriefing this week.

‘I’m sure that drone wasn’t here on September 14. It would have been impossible for me not to have noticed it,’ he told me. 

‘The dogs would also have seen it. They bark even when a plastic bag blows over the field, but there were pieces of drone everywhere.

‘I think there must have been a second wave, but the government probably doesn’t want to reveal that to the public to avoid causing alarm.’

The Polish prosecutors office told me they couldn’t comment on this incident for security reasons. 

However, if the Warsaw government are intent on playing down the threat of a full-blown invasion, they are sending out decidedly mixed messages.

Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk has just declared that his country is ‘the closest we have been to open warfare since World War II’, and he is rushing through a law that will make military training mandatory for adult males.

Conscription will bolster a 200,000-strong army that is already Nato’s third biggest (after the US and Turkey) and bristles with the firepower of 1,000 new South Korean tanks and hundreds of howitzers, shortly to be augmented by a £3billion fleet of F-16 fighter jets.

Later this month, the government will also send every Polish household an advice pack on how to survive a full-scale Russian invasion.

Families will be told what to take with them in ‘grab-and-go’ evacuation kits, such as medicines, identity documents, a radio, warm clothes, nourishing food, torches and batteries. 

The ante was further upped this week after US President Donald Trump called on Nato countries to shoot down any Russian aircraft entering their airspace. 

Poland’s foreign minister Radek Sikorski backed this with a defiant two-word tweet: ‘Roger that.’

Yet Putin, who also sent war planes into Estonia’s airspace for ten minutes earlier this month, is showing no inclination to back off.

On Wednesday, he is suspected to have targeted Denmark by flying drones over its military bases and airports. This provocative sortie has clearly rattled the usually phlegmatic Danes.

So, with the whiff of war fever growing ever stronger, what is the mood of the 38million Poles?

For these doughty Slavs, of course, the threat of being overrun from the East is nothing new. 

This is a land that has suffered the ambitions of expansionist Muscovite despots for aeons (witness my grandmother’s late 19th-century birth certificate, which says she was born in ‘Poland, Russian Empire’).

Journeying across the country this week, though, it was difficult to escape the fear that the ‘Eastern peril’ is about to return – with a vengeance.

Eager to capitalise on the nation’s angst, a Lodz-based company called Schron.pro recently started making bomb shelters supposedly guaranteed to keep a family of four alive for 30 days after a nuclear attack.

The owner’s daughter, Julia Nowakowska, told me they have already sold 15 – at £100,000 each – and more inquiries are flooding in every day. 

‘A lot of new Polish companies are making cheaper shelters but theirs are a sham because they are prefabricated and not safe,’ she claimed.

Her well-heeled clients insist that their shelters are built discreetly, she added, for they fear they would be commandeered by less wealthy refuge-seekers if war broke out.

Keen to learn how to fend for themselves in the wild, should they be forced to flee their homes, Poles are also flocking to join weekend courses run by outdoorsmen such as Piotr Czuryllo, 60, who lives in a ‘preppers’ commune in northern Poland. 

He teaches them how to forage for nuts and berries, find fresh water, set fires, use a compass and camp out in the forest, though he stops short of allowing them to join him in hunting wild boar and deer with his Winchester Magnum rifle.

‘Because of the position Poland is in, more and more people want to have these skills,’ the white-bearded former entrepreneur told me. 

‘They range from teenagers to people in their 70s, and many are women, I think because it’s their instinct to protect their families. 

‘Preppers know how to survive in the event of war, but it is in the genes of Polish people because we live between two powers, Russia and Germany, and have always faced the threat of invasion.’

And yet, as an uncomfortable opinion poll published on Wednesday revealed, among today’s population the resolve to defend the motherland is by no means universal. 

Almost half of those surveyed said they would not answer a call to arms in the event of war, with the highest number of refuseniks – 69 per cent – in the 18 to 29 years-old age group.

Evidently these Gen Z Poles are not made of the same stuff as their heroic great-grandparents, some of whom perished in epic battles such as the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis, which claimed up to 200,000 Polish lives.

In a nation where patriotism traditionally swells with every shot of vodka, their reluctance to serve is perplexing and will doubtless concern the government. 

It certainly sets them apart from young people in similarly threatened nations, such as Finland.

This week, however, when I met Poles who are very much up for the fight, fervour glinted in their eyes.

With war creeping ever closer, many parents are eager to enrol their children at a new type of high school that builds military training into the curriculum.

But as there only about 150 of these institutions in the country, many of them private, and fees typically cost £3,000 a year, they are affordable only to middle-class Poles, and places are at a premium.

Visiting one such school, in central Warsaw, was a strange experience. I sat in a classroom as pupils dressed in combat fatigues learned how to resuscitate a dummy soldier injured in battle and take apart and reassemble a replica AK-47 assault rifle. 

Had the lesson been staged in Britain, it would doubtless have brought the teachers’ union out on strike.

According to 15-year-old Zuzia Kuzniak, however, it was just the sort of thing a responsible Polish teenager ought to be practising.

‘These drones are making me feel uneasy – they [the Russians] wouldn’t do it for no reason,’ she told me, when I asked her whether she thought war was likely. 

‘I only came here four weeks ago so I haven’t learned to shoot yet, but my grandfather will help me. I love my country, and I’d fight for her.’

Smiling coyly, she added: ‘I’d shoot a human if necessary – but never an animal.’

Zuzia’s father, Andrzej, an IT manager who served in the Polish tank regiment is delighted with her progress. 

‘She likes discipline and being in the countryside, she wants a military career, and she is stressed about the international situation and wants to do something useful, so it’s great for her,’ he says.

‘I don’t like the fact that 50 per cent of Poles say they would escape to Germany rather than fight the Russians, maybe because they don’t respect the government, or whatever.

‘But that is Gen Z. It’s not just a Polish issue, it’s a global thing. Many young people are living their lives through TikTok.’

His daughter, he implies loftily, is cut from different cloth.

Later that afternoon, on the banks of the River Vistula, I saw a group of slightly older group of teenagers preparing to face Putin’s forces

Along with 15,000 other fierce patriots in recent years, they have joined the Riflemen’s Association, a quasi-military organisation founded in 1910 with the aim of liberating a Poland then partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary.

Wearing masks to hide their identity and giving only nicknames, they told me how they practise drills such as rescuing hostages and storming enemy posts.

Intriguingly, they also revealed how the Polish army sometimes uses them to play the part of Russian soldiers in their exercises.

To make these skirmishes more lifelike, they wear Russian soldiers’ second-hand uniforms, acquired cheaply on the internet, use fake munition with Russian labels, and those who can speak Russian bark orders in their language.

Given that Moscow’s intelligence is said to watch the activities of organisations such as the Riflemen’s Association, I suggested, wasn’t this form of role play rather foolhardy? Wouldn’t demonising the Russians in this way incite more enmity?

The commander of the 1863 Unit (a 25-year-old film industry worker dubbed ‘Sard’) scowled at me.

‘I don’t care about that!’ he snapped. ‘We have been offended by the Russians for hundreds of years, so don’t ask me about offending them.

‘We see the same situation now as in the 1920s, when Russia wanted to rebuild the empire of Catherine the Great. They could attack Poland at any time, but they won’t win. 

‘If they can’t defeat Ukraine in three years, they will lose [to Poland] in a year, maybe six months – if, of course, they don’t use the atom bomb.’

If Russia were to invade Poland by land, there are several possible points of attack. 

One is from Kaliningrad to the north; another could see troops storm through Suwalki Gap, a stretch of land between Poland and Lithuania.

Then there is the 256-mile border that separates the east of the country from Belarus, with its Moscow-friendly dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

For many years, this line was largely unguarded, and Belarussians and Poles could cross freely. 

But that changed in 2021 when – doubtless at Putin’s behest – Lukashenko began enacting a plot designed to destabilise the West, which continues today.

Thousands of African and Middle Eastern migrants are being flown to Belarus on the understanding that they will be helped to reach Britain, Germany and France. 

It has compelled Poland to erect a 16ft reinforced steel fence topped with razor wire and send hundreds of troops to support the Border Guard.

One young soldier was fatally stabbed by a migrant wielding a makeshift spear as he tried to stop him prizing open a gap in the barrier. 

On Monday, the day before my visit, 13 more would-be interlopers, some from Gambia and Afghanistan, were caught.

Now, though, there is a different kind of threat along this lonely border, with its dense pine and spruce forests and boggy terrain.

Though the rapid response unit who took me on patrol could not talk about their mission, they have been instructed to look out for low-flying drones and other possible military incursions.

‘The wheels of history are always turning and now they have come full circle,’ remarked the unit’s leader. 

‘We are in the same situation as my grandfather was in World War II, and I will honour his memory.’

As we juddered along in an armoured car, this amiable 46-year-old father of three’s mood darkened, and he recounted his forebears’ memories of Stalin’s army. 

Their animalistic behaviour had made the Nazis seem like gentlemen by comparison, he seethed. 

They raped Polish women, murdered children, and given the opportunity he had no doubt that they would do the same today.

‘You have to remember that the mentality of Russian people is different to ours,’ he said. ‘The price of life in the East is so much lower than in the West. 

‘If I had a Russian soldier in my sights and a child was near him, I wouldn’t fire. If the situation was reversed, the Russian would kill me, and then the kid.’

It was only one man’s opinion, but with Putin intent on pushing this proud nation to the brink and beyond, a reminder of the horrors that would unfold should the West fail to meet his threat.

Horrors that might transpire to have been preluded by the crushing of sunflowers in a farmer’s field.