The PLN 12 billion (EUR 2.6 billion) initiative was announced by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Wednesday, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.
The prime minister told a news conference in Warsaw: “Today the Cabinet adopted a resolution to launch a National Ammunition Programme, a scheme that will increase Poland’s capacity to produce ammunition.”
Morawiecki said that “currently 155mm or 120mm ammunition is selling like hot cakes,” adding that “demand far outstrips the manufacturing capacity of France, Germany and other European Union countries.”
€430m for investment + €2.6bn for ammunition rounds
He stated: “And so today we have approved a programme that encourages private entities, state-run companies, and also foreign entities, obviously those that have been vetted by our security services, to swiftly take up this challenge to set up new ammunition production facilities in Poland.”
The prime minister said the government was looking for projects that can be completed “in one or two years.”
Morawiecki declared that, under the new programme, the government would “allocate PLN 2 billion (EUR 430 million) for investment projects in the immediate future.”
He added: “When it comes to ammunition orders, the government will order 800,000 ammunition rounds worth PLN 12 billion (EUR 2.6 billion).”
Morawiecki told reporters: “This is the commitment that we have made and it will tangibly boost our capacity to secure ammunition in a short period of time, and ideally also to produce it domestically.”
Joint ammunition purchases
On March 20, seventeen EU countries and Norway agreed to jointly buy ammunition for Ukraine and to replenish their own stockpiles, according to an announcement by the European Defence Agency (EDA).
On March 23, the EDA tweeted that "three more member states have signed up to EDA's Collaborative Procurement of Ammunition project." It listed Poland, Lithuania and Spain.
At an EU summit in Brussels later that day, the bloc’s leaders, including Poland’s Morawiecki, endorsed a plan to send 1 million artillery shells to Ukraine over the next year, the Reuters news agency reported.
Morawiecki told reporters at the time that Poland would partner with other countries “to jointly purchase ammunition from those countries that have more of it, using funds from the EU’s European Peace Facility,” the PAP news agency reported.
Wednesday is day 399 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
(pm/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP, inwestycje.pl