Poland orders two spy ships from Sweden’s Saab

The Swedish arms group Saab announced on Friday a contract worth 620 million euros to supply two military intelligence vessels to Poland, amid rising tensions in the Baltic with Russia.

Deliveries are scheduled « current 2027 », indicates the aeronautics and defense group in a press release.

The two ships are specialized in intelligence of electromagnetic origin and the interception of signals (“signal intelligence” or SIGINT), specifies Saab.

Such military boats “are used to enable data to be obtained using the full spectrum of naval intelligence,” explains the Swedish group.

Saab will be the main operator of the contract for the design and production of the ships, but these will be manufactured in Poland on a site of the subcontractor Remontowa Shipbuilding.

The order comes against a backdrop of rising tensions in the Baltic Sea after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, particularly around the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, a highly militarized area nestled between Poland and Lithuania.

At the end of September, the underwater sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines linking Russia and Germany also put the Baltic at the heart of international tensions.

When Sweden’s and Finland’s NATO membership bids are validated, all of its neighboring states apart from Russia will be members of the Western military alliance.

Once considered a Cold War-era “Soviet lake” with the only NATO member Denmark, the Baltic has become a “NATO lake”, experts point out.

Before Finland and Sweden, which were neutral then non-aligned, Poland in 1999 and the three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) in 2004 had already joined the Atlantic alliance, a few years after the end of the Warsaw Pact.