Poland quits mine ban treaty, cites Russia threat
Poland will use antipersonnel as well as anti-tank land mines to defend its eastern border against the growing threat from Russia, Poland’s deputy defence minister told The Associated Press on Friday as the country officially left an international convention banning the use of the controversial weapons.
The 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty, also known as the Ottawa Convention, prohibits signatories from keeping or using antipersonnel mines, which can last for years and are known for having caused large-scale suffering among civilians in former conflict zones in countries including Cambodia, Angola and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Poland, which ratified the document in 2012 and completed the destruction of its domestic anti-personnel mine stockpile in 2016, withdrew from the treaty on Friday and says it plans to renew manufacturing weapons. “These mines are one of the most important elements of the defence structure we are constructing on the eastern flank of NATO, in Poland, on the border with Russia in the north and with Belarus in the east,” Pawel Zalewski, Poland’s deputy defence minister, said.
He said Poland needed to defend itself against Russia, a country which “has very aggressive intentions vis a vis its neighbours” and which itself never committed to the international land mine ban treaty. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, nearby countries have been reassessing their participation in the international treaty.
Last year, Warsaw joined Finland, the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Ukraine to announce it would leave the treaty. Russia is one of nearly three dozen countries that have never acceded to the Ottawa treaty, alongside the United States.
