WARSAW, Poland — Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s new cabinet has encountered a “difficulty” with the loan that Poland was supposed to receive from Seoul for acquiring South Korean weapons worth billions of dollars.
Tusk disclosed the issue as he was evaluating the defense procurements of the former government, as reported by the local news agency PAP.
Tusk also pledged to boost Poland’s defense budget and finalize the weapons deals that were initiated by the previous administration.
Tusk, who took office on Dec. 13, said his government’s “aim is to keep up the record spending on armament, and, of course, we are very concerned about spending this money wisely.”
“I am not sure who deceived whom, whether it was [ex-National Defence Minister Mariusz] Błaszczak or whether the Koreans have backed out,” Tusk said, according to PAP. “In the end, it turned out that there was a miscommunication, but I don’t want to point fingers at anyone.”
The former government of the Law and Justice party, which was ousted after Poland’s Oct. 15 parliamentary election, had agreed to buy various weapons from South Korea. These include FA-50 light attack aircraft, K9 howitzers, K2 Black Panther tanks, and K239 Chunmoo multi-barreled missile launchers.
Błaszczak, the ex-defense minister, responded on X, formerly Twitter, saying Tusk was “cutting costs,” accusing the new prime minister of “getting soldiers and the public ready for cancellations of weapon contracts.”
In response to Błaszczak’s comments, Deputy National Defence Minister Paweł Bejda tried to calm down the worries, but also suggested that the government’s plan was to have more weapons made by Polish factories.
“We don’t want to cause a stir. We are reviewing all kinds of contracts, we will discuss increasing the [weapon] production capabilities in Poland, so that at least 50 percent of armament spending remains at Polish plants,” Bejda told the local news site Money.pl.
In 2024, the Polish Ministry of National Defence is expected to have a record budget of about PLN 118.1 billion ($29.6 billion), or an estimated 3.1 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. More money for defense spending will be allocated from the country’s Armed Forces’ Support Fund.
