By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
WARSAW/BUDAPEST (Worthy News) – Poland’s president says he has discussed with Washington transferring U.S. nuclear weapons to its territory as a deterrent against Russian aggression.
Andrzej Duda said he spoke about the issue with U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg.
Poland has previously made clear it would be ready to host U.S. weapons under a nuclear arms-sharing program.
Additionally, Polish policymakers have recently expressed interest in French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to extend Paris’s nuclear umbrella to its European allies.
“Russia did not even hesitate when they were relocating their nuclear weapons into Belarus,” Duda told the Financial Times newspaper about actions Russia took beginning in 2023, a year after it invaded Ukraine. “They didn’t ask anyone’s permission.”
The White House did not immediately respond.
However, Trump has said the U.S. will defend NATO military alliance members such as Poland if they spend more on defense.
NATIONAL DEFENSE
Duda recently announced that his country plans to spend 4.7 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defense this year.
He added that the national defense budget is expected to reach 30 billion euros ($32.5 billion), making it the largest among NATO countries. According to official figures, Poland already spends 4.1 percent of its GDP on defense.
This week, the Polish Prime Minister
Donald Tusk also said the government wants to launch a new program to offer voluntary military training starting next year, with a target of training 100,000 volunteers in 2027. “The most important thing for us is that every person interested can participate in such training no later than 2026. And that is a difficult task, but I know it is doable,” Tusk added.
“In 2027, we will achieve the ability to train 100,000 volunteers per year…
Apart from the professional army and beyond the Territorial Defence Force, we must de facto build an army of reservists, and our actions will serve this purpose.”
Poland’s concerns about Russia are rooted in its recent history: the country was occupied by Russian soldiers as a Soviet satellite state from the end of World War Two until 1993.
Adding nuclear weapons to its military deterrence is seen as crucial in Warsaw. Duda’s advisor on international affairs, Wojciech Kolarski, echoed the Polish president’s nuclear plea Thursday on Polish radio.
He said as a NATO member who shares a border with Russia’s Kaliningrad region, as well as war-torn Ukraine and Belarus, the atomic weapons steps were necessary for the security of Eastern Europe’s largest economy outside Russia.
Copyright 1999-2026 Worthy News. This article was originally published on Worthy News and was reproduced with permission.
Latest News from Worthy News
The U.S. unemployment rate unexpectedly dipped to 4.2 percent in June, even as hiring slowed sharply and employers added far fewer jobs than economists had forecast, according to new Labor Department data released Thursday.
Despite the looming 2026 midterm elections and the growing list of congressional responsibilities, a persistent group of Republicans are vowing to obstruct all U.S. House business until leadership effectively forces the Senate to take up a voter ID bill.
Iran’s military command warned the United States and Israel on Thursday against launching any new attack as the Islamic Republic prepares a massive state funeral for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in Israeli airstrikes on February 28 at the opening of the war.
The Ukrainian Red Cross said Thursday that one of its main humanitarian warehouses was destroyed in a large-scale Russian attack on Kyiv that killed at least 27 people and injured more than 90 others in the deadliest strike on the Ukrainian capital this year.
The Dutch centrist government came under mounting pressure Thursday after another municipality announced it would refuse to accommodate asylum seekers despite national legislation requiring local authorities to help shelter people fleeing war, persecution, and poverty.
The French government faced mounting political pressure Thursday after nearly 3,000 people were evacuated from wildfires in southern France, prompting Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to warn that this year’s fire season had begun weeks earlier than usual following a record-breaking heatwave blamed for killing thousands of people in France and neighboring Spain.
Turkey has condemned Israel for recognizing the Armenian Genocide, the systematic killing of some 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, ahead of hosting next week’s NATO summit.