Poland’s right-wing nationalist president Karol Nawrocki visits Paris and Berlin on Tuesday, seeking help to shore up his country’s eastern defences in the wake of a major Russian drone incursion.
Nawrocki has often been a fierce critic of Germany but Poland is seeking the support of its EU and NATO partners after last week’s incident, when at least 17 drones violated its airspace.
Russia has denied targeting Poland but Warsaw says the incursion was a deliberate attack and has raised fears that Moscow’s confrontation with the West could escalate beyond the Ukrainian battlefield.
Germany now plans to extend its air defence mission in eastern Poland by three months while doubling the number of its Eurofighter combat jets deployed to four.
France will send three Rafale jet fighters to join them.
European support is all the more important to Poland now that US President Donald Trump has played down the incursion, suggesting that the drones may have entered Polish territory by “mistake”.
Nawrocki is a fervent admirer of Trump, but Poland insists Russia was deliberately testing NATO’s defences and has called for allied support.
Poland and some of its European allies scrambled jets to down the drones.
The first leg of Nawrocki’s visit, to Berlin for talks with Germany’s foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and a meeting with Chancellor Friedrich Merz, may be the most delicate.
Nawrocki may use his visit to renew his demands that Germany pay Poland reparations over its treatment of Polish civilians during the World War II occupation.
This stance is just the latest to put him at odds with Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s pro-European government.
In 2022, the right-wing nationalist government in power in Warsaw at the time estimated Polish losses during World War II at 1.3 trillion euros ($1.5 trillion).
Germany argues that Poland renounced any claim to reparations in 1953, while under pressure from the Soviet Union.
The Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, has said seeking financial compensation is futile, arguing that Poland should resign itself to that fact in the name of Polish-German relations.
But he recently suggested Berlin could make a gesture by investing even more than at present in the defence of Poland.
After Berlin, Nawrocki will head to Paris to meet his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, to discuss trade and defence.
The Polish side said the presidents would address the issue of the free trade agreement between Latin American Mercosur countries and the European Union.
Poland has already declared that it will vote against the agreement, which it considers highly detrimental to Polish and European agriculture, and that it will seek to ally France to its cause.
