Poland quits Ottawa Treaty

Poland says it is withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines and intends to deploy them as part of its defence posture against Russia, according to WTOP. It is a blunt admission that “norm regimes” are only as durable as the security environment that surrounds them—and that, on NATO’s eastern flank, geography is again the primary legislator.

The Ottawa Treaty, in force since 1999, was built on a moral and humanitarian argument: mines keep killing and maiming civilians long after wars end, and the cost is disproportionately borne by people who never signed any declaration of war. That logic remains true. What has changed is the incentive structure for states that believe they may have to fight a large conventional invasion.

From Warsaw’s perspective, anti-personnel mines are not a nostalgic return to 20th-century brutality; they are cheap, passive area denial. They do not require air superiority, exquisite targeting, or a functioning supply chain under fire. They scale quickly, can be emplaced by relatively small units, and—crucially—shift costs onto an attacker. In an era where European defence procurement is synonymous with decade-long timelines and contractor-friendly overruns, mines are the rare capability that can be fielded on the schedule that war imposes.

The move also exposes the uncomfortable gap between Europe’s legal architecture and its actual security architecture. “Humanitarian” arms-control treaties were sold as irreversible progress, a kind of moral compound interest. But treaties are voluntary, and the enforcement mechanism is ultimately reputational—effective only when states feel safe enough to care. When the perceived probability of invasion rises, reputational costs are discounted. Paper victories depreciate.

There is a second-order effect: once a frontline state exits a ban, neighbours reassess. If Poland—one of the EU’s most militarily serious members—concludes the treaty is a self-imposed handicap, others will ask why they should remain bound by it while relying on Warsaw to absorb the first удар. The likely result is not a tidy debate about ethics, but a cascade of “exceptions,” “temporary measures,” and “unique circumstances” that ends with the ban existing mostly as a plaque on a conference-room wall.

For proponents of a rules-based order, this is the nightmare scenario: international law as a luxury good. For everyone else, the ultimate sovereign is the state’s survival instinct—and deterrence is still built from capabilities, not communiqués.

None of this makes mines “good.” It makes them rational for governments that believe they may soon be asked to trade lives for time. And it should prompt a more honest conversation: if Europe wants fewer mines, it must offer credible alternatives that work under battlefield constraints—not just moral condemnation after the fact.