Russia's war in Ukraine creeps into everyday life in Poland

Poles in the country's east are hearing warning sirens and getting text alerts about Russian air incursions

In Poland's eastern city of Lublin, popular with tourists for its medieval gates and pastel facades, residents are growing accustomed to warning sirens and the roar of fighter jets scrambled in response to the threat of Russian drones or missiles.

Locals have been receiving emergency text alerts about possible Russian air incursions since early September, while the city's airport suspended civilian flights six times that month to make room for the military to protect Poland's airspace.

Lublin's experience shows how five years into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war has started to intrude on everyday life in neighbouring Poland.

Warsaw has raised the alert level in its eastern regions of Lublin and Subcarpathia, after Moscow escalated its bombing of western Ukraine in recent months by using more jet-powered drones and missiles capable of reaching as far as Polish territory. A Russian helicopter also violated Polish airspace near the Russian military base of Kaliningrad in September.

"We had perhaps been thinking too long of this war as something that could happen only on the other side of our border," said Dariusz Krzysztofik, deputy director of the public safety department in Lublin, which is located 100km from the Ukrainian border.

"Russia is now putting a lot of effort into getting us also to panic, although I'm confident that the Russians are actually increasing our resilience and making us more conscious that we really have to help Ukraine."

In Wąwolnica, a village a further 35km west of Lublin, mayor Marcin Łaguna said residents were becoming increasingly nervous about Russia, but also frustrated by "an information overload" of emergency text messages.

"We have no strategic assets worth destroying here, and in any case everybody knows that we don't have the money to build a shelter to protect us against a big attack," he said. "The problem is that when people keep getting warnings, they end up ignoring them."

Ewa Lenartowicz, a resident of Wąwolnica, said that she disregarded alerts sent to her phone, but could not sleep through the sound of military aircraft overhead.

"We grew up under communism, so my family has always kept food and other emergency reserves in the cellar should things suddenly get much worse, but it's a new kind of stress to get woken up by fighter jets," she said.

Poland has this year allocated almost 5 per cent of GDP to defence, making it proportionately Nato's biggest military spender. Warsaw has ordered hundreds of aircraft, helicopters and tanks, but investment in civilian protection, particularly bomb shelters, has lagged behind.

Earlier this year, Lublin opened its first fully sealed shelter, capable of housing about 200 people against chemical warfare and radioactive particles. The city plans to upgrade another 101 shelters to similarly high standards of protection within three years.

"Until 2024, we had no money [from the national government] for such investments," Krzysztofik said. "We now have some money, but we still need the time."

Lublin has enough underground car parks and other shelters to protect the population of the greater metropolitan area of more than 450,000 against a Russian drone attack. But only 38,000 residents could now find refuge in shelters designed to withstand a more powerful -- albeit less likely -- strike from a Russian Oreshnik ballistic missile, Krzysztofik said.

The city is also racing to expand its network of warning sirens, which can now be heard by about 70 per cent of residents, in order to cover the whole of greater Lublin by year-end.

"Everybody is still enjoying a normal life in Lublin, but I think there's now a different atmosphere than in Warsaw, also because people have friends [outside eastern Poland] who have been asking about how they're managing under high alert," said Krzysztofik.

In October, Lublin's authorities started putting green-and-orange signposts on buildings to mark evacuation routes and shelter locations. One recent meeting on emergency procedures attracted 250 people, compared with 10-20 residents attending such events before the summer, Krzysztofik said.

The Polish government is reinforcing its military presence around Lublin in response to Russia's airspace violations, but also hybrid warfare attacks. Warsaw has attributed several acts of sabotage to Russia since last November, when Poland narrowly avoided a train crash after an explosive device damaged Lublin's main railway to the capital.

In early October, defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz announced that some Patriot air-defence batteries would be deployed around Lublin airport for the first time. A new helicopter base will also be established there, alongside three additional military units, including a counter-drone brigade in nearby Łuków.

The reinforcements are intended in part to bring Lublin up to the level of Rzeszów in the south-east, whose airport has served as a crucial hub for military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022.

As part of broader efforts to protect against Russia, Poland's government is also undertaking a €2.3bn investment called Eastern Shield to add barriers and anti-tank ditches along 700km of Poland's eastern border. A Polish-Norwegian consortium is separately building a €3.5bn "drone wall" of 18 mobile counter-drone batteries.

The growing army presence may reassure residents, but local officials are concerned that militarisation could undermine corporate investments in eastern Poland, whose economy has long lagged Warsaw and the west of the country.

While Poland is growing at three times the average EU rate, Lublin is Poland's poorest region, with a GDP per capita about one-third that of Warsaw.

In Wąwolnica, the Polish army is renovating a bridge to meet military transport standards. Mayor Łaguna welcomes the army's contribution, but he is pessimistic about the local economy.

"Investors calculate whether a region is safe, so we have plenty of reasons to worry now also about losing out economically,'' he said. ''The risk of war with Russia is never going to be attractive."