Establishing NATO’s “East Shield”
The situation on the Polish eastern border has demonstrated that threats to Poland and the European Union are no longer purely military. Hybrid warfare directed westwards is made up of a composite of orchestrated migration, cyberattacks, disinformation and acts of border sabotage. This complex threat landscape demands an equally sophisticated and multidimensional response.
December 8, 2025 -
Alicja Zyguła
Tomasz Stępniewski
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AnalysisIssue 6 2025Magazine
The contemporary international security environment is marked by profound fluidity and unpredictability. The traditional paradigm of security, with its clear distinction between war and peace, is eroding in the face of complex, multidimensional hybrid threats. Poland finds itself at the epicentre of these transformations, largely due to its geostrategic location on the Eastern Flank of both NATO and the European Union. The situation on Poland’s border with Belarus, artificially engineered by the regimes in Minsk and Moscow, together with the full-scale war in Ukraine, constitutes a direct challenge to the state’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
In this context, the national deterrence and defence programme known as the “East Shield” (in Polish Tarcza Wschód), announced by the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk in May 2024, emerges as a comprehensive and strategic response. In this essay, we analyse the East Shield programme as a crucial mechanism for strengthening the military security and resilience of Poland and, by extension, the entire Eastern Flank of the Alliance. The central research problem is to define the role and tasks of East Shield in countering contemporary hybrid and conventional threats. The thesis here is that the East Shield represents a qualitatively new, multi-domain, and interagency approach to border security, integrating military deterrence with civilian resilience to address the full spectrum of hybrid warfare.
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