New Delhi: India and Poland are “friends” and the two countries are looking to expand their defence cooperation, with potential joint ventures or larger armament purchases in the pipeline, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Władysław T. Bartoszewski told ThePrint in an exclusive interview.
Bartoszewski’s three-day visit to New Delhi comes close on the heels of a meeting between External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, and Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, in the Indian capital on 19 January, which showcased a frostiness in ties between the countries.
“If you talk to India, which is a friendly country with which we have a strategic agreement, we can point out issues which concern us, and India can point out issues which concern India. I mean, this is normal between friends,” Bartoszewski said.
He added: “We have an agreement for a working group between our defence sectors, and we are trying to organise meetings of that now, which would be kind of at the government level, at the military level, and then the defence industry levels. So we’re trying to involve all three of them, and given that we’ve got 44 billion (euros) additional money on defence spending available this year, we would also like to involve India and the Indian arms industry in potentially using some of this money. We want to sign a memorandum on cybersecurity cooperation with India.”
The Polish deputy foreign minister further said that the bilateral relationship is moving forward in strategic areas, following a meeting Thursday with Sibi George, Secretary (West) in the Ministry of External Affairs.
The Jaishankar-Sikorski meeting last month had witnessed a rare rebuke from the Indian minister, when he outlined issues with “selective targeting” of India’s Russian oil purchases. Sikorski had in January announced that Poland was happy that India was curtailing its purchases of crude from Moscow, as a part of a perceived public campaign against New Delhi.
Jaishankar had also raised the matter of Sikorski’s visit to Pakistan in October 2025, and the mention of Jammu and Kashmir in a “joint statement” published by Warsaw and Islamabad. That had crossed a red line for New Delhi, as previously reported by ThePrint.
“Well, we see that as a known issue because we are definitely against state terrorism wherever it occurs, and we are quite actively fighting it in Europe, and we were instrumental in trying to help India to fight it in other parts of the world,” said Bartoszewski, when questioned on issues relating to cross-border terrorism and Sikorski’s visit to Pakistan. Jaishankar and Sikorski “resolved” the issue on the Pakistan trip, he explained.
On the joint statement references on Jammu and Kashmir, Bartoszewski said, “No, the statement didn’t say anything about that. We insist that solutions to the problems should be done in peaceful ways.”
He added: “Independent countries have their own views on how to approach it. We have had diplomatic relations with India for a very long time, and we have diplomatic relations with Pakistan. It has nothing, one has nothing to do with the other.”
Raft of visits on the anvil, boost to defence ties soon
The Polish deputy foreign minister further highlighted that Jaishankar—who interacted with Sikorski Wednesday in the US on the margins of the Critical Minerals Ministerial hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio—has accepted an invitation to visit Poland soon, as New Delhi and Warsaw look at securing strong outcomes on the current plans in the pipeline.
“We are looking at the investments by our companies into the Indian space programme, which provides security to India…So the fact also that we’ve got a trade memorandum and the defence agreement [with the EU] means that we can get closer in these matters, because India is a like-minded country, which faces…which has a difficult neighbourhood…seen from New Delhi, and we appreciate that,” said Bartoszewski.
He added: “If you look at the numbers of potential for future planned visits between our top country officials in India and Indians in Poland, it’s a very close link, and we want to make it more real by making closer business to business as well, because this is something which improves relations between states, if you improve your levels of investment, levels of trade, of course, it’s more.”
Apart from a potential Jaishankar visit, the Polish government is set to send a delegation to the Impact AI Summit set to be hosted in the Indian national capital later this month, followed by presence at the Raisina Dialogue scheduled for first week of March, and the potential meeting of the joint working group on military affairs.
“There are certain types of armaments which India would be interested in buying from us. There are certain types of arms which India would be interested, potentially, in servicing in Poland. There’s also some types of armaments which India would like to produce in Poland, or form a joint venture of something to be produced in India,” said Bartoszewski. “So, there’s a very wide range of potential options to be discussed, and that’s why we want the working group on defence to meet and start looking at what we should be doing first, and how we should be doing that, because all options are on the table.”
Poland has one of the largest defence budgets globally in relation to its gross domestic product. The Central European country’s GDP crossed $1 trillion recently, and its defence budget is around $55 billion or 5 percent—far higher than a lot of other countries, including India, which has seen its defence budget grow to 1.99 percent of its GDP this year.
The Polish military has seen a raft of investments since the Russia-Ukraine war began in 2022, with Bartoszewski highlighting that Moscow is an “existential threat” for Poland.
“Well, it was a frank discussion [with Jaishankar last month] in which Minister Sikorski stated quite clearly, that Russia finances the war by selling oil and gas, and therefore if you buy oil and gas, you help Russia to conduct the war. And India has changed its position, and now it dropped very dramatically the amount of oil it buys from Russia, and we welcome that move, and we fully support India.”
However, he made it clear that Warsaw does not have a “problem with India”.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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