Poland

Poland is NATO's easternmost heavy-industrial member and its highest defence spender at 4% of GDP, sharing a 535km border with Ukraine that has made it the primary corridor for Western military aid since Russia's 2022 invasion. On 24 May 2026 Warsaw scrambled fighter jets as Russia fired the war's largest single barrage on Kyiv, its first dual launch of a nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile. Weeks earlier the IDF's chief of staff had named Warsaw among the European capitals sitting within Iran's long-range missile envelope.

Domestically, Poland is governed under cohabitation: pro-EU prime minister Donald Tusk, in office since December 2023, shares power with president Karol Nawrocki, who beat Tusk's ally Rafal Trzaskowski in the 2025 election. The standoff has slowed nominations and forced a July cabinet reshuffle even as growth of roughly 3.5% keeps Poland among the EU's fastest-expanding major economies.

Warsaw's energy transition is a genuine domestic story: coal's share of electricity generation has fallen from over 80% in 2018 to roughly 53% under EU carbon pricing, even as Brussels warned Poland in April it was fifteen months late transposing the bloc's consumer electricity-price directive, one step from a Court of Justice referral. Poland is also one of five partners in the LEAP counter-drone programme awaiting its own funding release after Britain moved first in July 2026, part of a wider surge in which new state buyers including Poland drove much of 2026's first-quarter counter-drone spending jump.