The Armed Forces Agency has informed of the launch of first marketplace consultations on the acquisition of anti-personnel mines. The applicable paper has just been published in the Public Information Bulletin. Let us remind – on 20 February Poland formally ceased to be a organization to the Ottawa Convention after the safety environment changed after Russia's attack on Ukraine.
The announcement issued by the Armed Forces Agency is not yet a tender or an invitation to tender. It is simply a formal signal that the Ministry of Defence wants to check what solutions are available on the marketplace and at what time and at what price could be delivered to the Armed Forces of Poland. designation is intended to cover circumstantial types anti-personnel mines: shrapnel-directional, shrapnel-jump, shrapnel-surface and pressure.
This decision falls within the broader political and strategical context – earlier Poland's denunciation of the provisions of the Ottawa Convention, i.e. the global treaty prohibiting the use, production and retention of anti-personnel mines.
What is this procedure?
Preliminary marketplace consultations are a tool provided for in public procurement law. Their aim is to collect information from possible contractors before announcing the appropriate purchasing procedure. In practice, this means that the Armed Forces Agency wants to know what types of mines are presently produced and available, what safety and self-elimination technologies manufacture offers, what are real transportation times, how much specified solutions can cost and whether there are production opportunities in the country or the transfer of technology.
It's an exploratory phase. It does not affect the choice of a peculiar company or the conclusion of a contract. On the another hand, it avoids a situation in which the contracting authority publishes a tender with requirements that are not technically or financially feasible. In the case of arms – especially as politically delicate as anti-personnel mines – the preparation of substantive proceedings is crucial.
Why are the mines coming back?
Poland has been a organization to the Ottawa Convention for over 2 decades, which entered into force in 1999 (we ratified it in 2012). The Treaty prohibited the use, production, retention and transfer of anti-personnel mines and imposed an work to destruct existing stocks. Poland, like many another European countries, has liquidated its warehouses with specified weapons.
The change followed Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2022. The war showed that a full-scale conflict in Europe is not an abstract scenario. At the same time, the Russian Federation – which is not a organization to the convention – widely uses anti-personnel and anti-tank mines as an component of position defence and slowing down the opponent.
The Polish strategical debate increasingly argued that the state on the east NATO flank should have a full scope of engineering resources to form the battlefield, including the anticipation of laying mine dams. The Ministry of Defence stressed that the aim was not to return to the mass and uncontrolled usage of mines known as the conflicts of the 20th century, but to make legal and method possibilities for specified measures in accordance with the applicable safety standards.
