Polish schoolchildren will soon be receiving one hour of mandatory firearm training each week that includes safe handling, field stripping and marksmanship using laser-based systems. The course also teaches survival skills, first aid and cybersecurity. No live ammunition is used in the classes, which will be held in school gymnasiums.
The “Education for Safety” program was announced late last year in response to heightened concerns Russia will invade Poland, which is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The communist military is currently mired in the war it launched against Ukraine in 2022, although the sheer volume of troops and hardware it has amassed in the area continue to increase tension and probability of an incursion—whether deliberate or inadvertent.
The Polish Department of National Education explained in a written statement that, “For primary schools, requirements include knowledge of the local area, cybersecurity in the military dimension, preparation for shooting training; and for secondary schools, children must know how to respond to a threat of warfare, cybersecurity in the military dimension, and participate in shooting training.”
Concerns that a NATO-member nation will be attacked are underscored by Russian President Vladmir Putin’s insistence that any country providing supplies to Ukraine’s military is directly intervening in the war. Ukraine’s efforts to join NATO stalled after the invasion, although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made it clear his country wants to enter the organization, which was formed in 1949, just as the Cold War heated.
The Polish military has roughly 300,000 members. A Putin decree, issued late last year, increased the size of Russia’s armed forces to 2.38 million according to AlJazeera. It’s the third time the communist nation has issued orders bolstering its fighting force size since its invasion of Ukraine bogged down on the ground and in the air.
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