Poland would defeat Russia quickly in attack on NATO, says foreign minister

Poland says it would defeat Russia quickly if Moscow attempted an attack on the alliance amid an increasing number of hybrid attacks on Europe.

Foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorksi said a victory against Vladimir Putin’s forces would be swift due to the “overwhelming superiority” of its air forces, even without support from the United States.

“If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly. We have overwhelming superiority over Russia in air power. General, correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s something like 2,500 aircraft,” he said during a discussion at the Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv on Saturday.

“Even without the US it’s still overwhelming, and I haven’t checked recently how many F-35s and JASSMs and all the deep-strike capabilities we have.”

He went further to say that Poland could knock out half of Russia’s refining capacity in a matter of weeks. The comments were in relation to a potential conflict between Russia and Nato and not about the prospect of a direct war between Russia and Poland.

“But if the Ukrainians have knocked out half of Russia’s refining capacity in six months, we could do it in six weeks and take out the other half,” he continued.

Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused Sikorski of “Russophobia of the brain” in discussing the conflict.

Speculation has abounded that Moscow is plotting to attack Nato, claims that the country has denied.

Last month CIA director John Ratcliffe made a short trip to Moscow - the last time that a CIA chief visited the country personally was in the weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Several sources familiar with the discussions told CBS News that Ratcliffe had made the visit to warn Russia against an attack on Nato.

Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Dmitry Peskov dismissed the claims and said: “A lot of such scare stories are being published right now. Of course, they have nothing to do with reality.”

But European leaders are consistent that Putin may be trying to intimidate western countries.

On Sunday, a Russian drone attack on a train on Ukraine’s border with Nato member Poland occurred shortly after another train holding former prime minister Boris Johnson left Kyiv after a security conference.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on Monday said that such attacks were mean to scare Western countries from supporting Ukraine.

“I think we should act the opposite. We should show that we are there for Ukraine and we are not scared,” she told reporters in Rovaniemi, Finland where she attended a summit on Arctic strategy.

Recent analysis by the Institute for the Study of War suggested that Russian forces made “near-zero net gains since March 2026”.