Distinction Matter - Subscribed Feeds

This is the Chapel of the International Seminary of St. Pius X in Écône, Switzerland. Please note how uncluttered the chapel is; how prominent and easy to see, the altar is and how beautiful the ambo/pulpit is. Please note, too, that the altar railing is on the first step up from the nave of the chapel making its use quite easy for young and old alike. 
Most modern Mass sanctuaries are cluttered with plants, flowers, fabric and banners. The altar is too low and thus makes it seem as though it is absent in a full church. There is no spaciousness for other types of liturgies be they ordinations, nuptial liturgies or funeral liturgies. 
Please note the reverence for the deceased body of a retired bishop of Chur who chose to join the SSPX and not to be buried in his former cathedral but next to Archbishop Lefebrve. You can read the Pillar story HERE.

Charities claim authorities are clearing out homeless people ahead of the Games this summer

French police have carried out a large-scale eviction at the country’s biggest squat in Paris, just 100 days before the Olympic Games are due to start in the city, local media have reported.  

The squat, in an abandoned bus company headquarters in Vitry-sur-Seine, had been home to up to 450 people, including 20 children and 50 women, according to aid workers. At least ten children reportedly attended local schools.  

Images of the eviction on Wednesday rapidly spread across social media.  

Footage showed officers forcing their way into the camp and examining locked rooms as they oversaw the removal of residents. Makeshift beds and furniture were seen on the floors and in the hallways of the building, along with abandoned personal belongings. Evicted migrants gathered outside with packed suitcases, while others were seen boarding buses.   

Activists have linked the move to the broader effort by Paris authorities to clear out migrants and others sleeping rough in the city before the summer Olympics. They claim the government has launched the campaign to make the French capital “more presentable.”  

“The squat was the biggest in France. It doubled in size in one year because of the Olympics. Last year, authorities cleared out migrants from nearby the Olympic Village, and many displaced people came here,” Paul Alauzy of the NGO Medecins du Monde told the AP.  

Alauzy, who is also a spokesperson for Revers de la Medaille (The Medal’s Other Side), a collective of charities and aid workers, said homeless people and squats have been steadily cleared out for the past year.   

Aid workers have warned that the Olympics are affecting the most vulnerable homeless people in the Paris area as those evicted are not provided with longer-term housing assistance.  

When asked about Wednesday’s evacuation, French Sports Minister Amelie Oudea-Castera said “it has nothing to do with the Olympics,” according to the AP.   

Earlier, French authorities claimed that the recent relocations were the result of emergency accommodation centers reaching saturation, claiming that the measure is unrelated to the Games.  

France received 167,000 asylum requests in 2023, the second-highest number in the EU. Migrants were mostly from Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.

In this current age of mass media and constant Internet access, the process of theological reception can oftentimes be rushed and clumsy. The race is on, as it were, to forge and brandish one’s latest “hot take” on any given Church topic, document, or papal interview. Merely minutes after the introduction of Dignitas Infinita by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF)…

Source

A newly released study from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University surveyed the men who will be ordained to the priesthood in 2024. The data shows that families continue to be the seedbed of religious vocations: of the 392 respondents, 95 percent were raised by their biological parents, and 88 percent were raised by a married couple who lived together.
 

The post Who is being ordained to the priesthood? appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, a collection of essays by scientists and philosophers dismantles the claims that the universe came into being, and mankind evolved, through a process of random chance. Those claims, the authors demonstrate, are both scientifically and philosophically untenable – not to mention incompatible with Christian faith. It is not an easy thing to move the scientific consensus. Nevertheless, it moves.
 

The post Trust the science, not the scientists appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

Suddenly, western politicians from US President Joe Biden to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have become ardent champions of “restraint” – in a very last-minute scramble to avoid regional conflagration. Iran launched a salvo of drones and missiles at Israel at the weekend in what amounted a largely symbolic show of strength. Many appear to have been … Continue reading "The West Now Wants ‘Restraint’ – After Months of Fueling a Genocide in Gaza"

The post The West Now Wants ‘Restraint’ – After Months of Fueling a Genocide in Gaza appeared first on Antiwar.com.

“Flood conditions continued to impact Dubai on Wednesday, after two years’ worth of rain fell in just 24 hours, records show. Over a half foot — 6.26 inches — of rain was recorded in the United Arab Emirates city between 10 p.m. local time Monday and 10 p.m. local time Tuesday, according to the Dubai Meteorological Office.”

https://abcnews.go.com/International/dubai-flooding-heavy-rainfall/story?id=109321601

Western states need to send more air defense systems to Kiev, the head of the bloc says

NATO members should prioritize arming Ukraine over bolstering their own defense capabilities, the secretary general of the US-led military bloc said on Wednesday. 

“A part of the important effort we are now making across the NATO alliance to step up our delivery of air defense systems to Ukraine,” Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels. 

“But Ukraine needs even more. That is why if allies face a choice between meeting NATO capability targets and providing more aid to Ukraine, my message is clear: send more to Ukraine.”

Stoltenberg pointed to Denmark as “a strong example” as it pledged in February to donate all of its artillery to Kiev. He praised both Denmark and the Netherlands for their plans to provide F-16 fighter jets, adding that he was “encouraged” by the news that the US Congress is expected soon to vote for additional aid to Ukraine, after months of delay.

The NATO chief’s appeal comes at a time when member states are struggling to deliver sufficient amounts of weapons to Ukraine without depleting their own stocks and compromising security. Officials in Kiev have blamed ammunition shortages for last year’s failed counteroffensive, as well as recent battlefield losses.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has sharply criticized Germany for refusing to donate its Taurus air-launched cruise missiles and US Republicans for stalling the $61 billion military aid bill sought by President Joe Biden.

“If Congress doesn’t help Ukraine, Ukraine will lose the war,” Zelensky warned earlier this month.

Berlin recently agreed to supply another US-made Patriot air defense system to Kiev. However it has refused to reverse its decision on Taurus missiles, arguing that sending them would require German personnel on the ground in Ukraine.

US House Speaker Mike Johnson has announced that he will put the Ukraine aid bill to a vote on Saturday. The legislation was previously stalled due to the bitter quarrels between Democrats and Republicans over immigration and border security.

Russia continues to insist that deliveries of foreign weapons will lead to more escalation, but will not change the course of the conflict. “The West continues to pump the Zelensky regime with weapons and is becoming an accomplice to its horrific crimes,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in January.

Since certain Republican presidential candidates have recently distanced themselves from, or outright rejected, pro-life state supreme court decisions in Arizona, Florida, and Alabama, while praising counter-legislation such as that examined here, a closer look at that legislation’s content and actual scope seems worthwhile. Political calculations about toning down the conservative party’s pro-life identity to win elections are being touted at the moment. But if sacrifices or concessions are to be made, one must at least know what is being given up and what is being gained.

The new Alabama Act SB159 grants IVF providers civil and criminal immunity for any “death or damage to an embryo.” This partially reverses the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision that recognized extrauterine human embryos as children and granted tort remedies for their destruction. The new law, and the astounding events surrounding its passage, were the product of intense propaganda and political pressure from the political Left and the artificial reproduction industry to exploit election-year politics, attack yet another pro-life court judgment, and successfully divide Republicans.

The act partially reverses the holding in LePage, Fonde & Aysenne v. Center for Reproductive Medicine & Mobile Infirmary Association, in which the Alabama Supreme Court held that Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act allows parents of a deceased child to recover punitive damages for the death of extrauterine human embryos created in vitro. The case concludes that IVF embryos are included in the term “minor child” under the statute. 

In this case, the embryos of three married couples—the LePages, the Fondes, and the Aysennes—were destroyed in a bizarre incident at an IVF clinic. A patient entered the clinic’s frozen embryo bank, without authorization or supervision, to remove some embryos (probably their own) and accidentally destroyed the plaintiffs’ five embryos in the process.

As noted by Justice Jay Mitchell, who wrote the majority opinion, all parties to the litigation, including the Center for Reproductive Medicine and the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center, agreed that “an unborn child is a genetically unique human whose life begins at fertilization,” and that an unborn child qualifies as a “human life,” “human being,” or “person” throughout all stages of development regardless of viability. The clinics disagreed, however, arguing that an extrauterine human embryo, who is not physically located in utero, would not be a “child” or “person” and, therefore, would not be within the class of persons protected by the Wrongful Death Act. In contrast, the Alabama Supreme Court found that the physical location of the human embryo, like any other ancillary characteristics, did not exclude him from the act’s protection.

The LePage judgment recognized some measure of accountability against IVF providers that, by wrongful act, negligence, or omission cause the destruction of human embryos. It allowed a private cause of action to parents for money damages for the loss or destruction of their own human embryos in an IVF clinic. The ruling did not prohibit any artificial reproduction procedures or impose any penalties on IVF providers in Alabama. The plaintiffs themselves stated that they had conceived healthy children through IVF before and “did not intend to hinder or impair” access to IVF treatment.

The seed for the distortion of the holding’s scope, and of the subsequent rejection of the ruling, seems to have been planted by Justice Greg Cook, who wrote the sole opinion that dissented in full, siding with the IVF providers in the lawsuit. Despite affirming his agreement that life begins at conception, Justice Cook rejected the idea that the extrauterine human embryo could be included in the legal definition of the terms “child,” “person,” and “minor” under Alabama law. He also referred to the plaintiffs’ deceased embryos as “frozen embryos,” a term suggesting a non-living status for the cryopreserved embryo. This term was later used as the only designation for the deceased embryos by most of the press.

Judge Cook’s dissent directly addressed the Alabama legislature, repeatedly calling it to adopt legislation that would reverse the judgment. The dissent echoed the defendants’ threat that the recognition of “frozen embryos” as children would “almost certainly end the creation of frozen embryos” in the state of Alabama, “lead to fewer newborn babies,” and end “this medical procedure,” creating a “huge impact on many Alabamians.”

In its amicus brief siding with the defendant clinics in the litigation, the Medical Association of the State of Alabama threatened to raise IVF costs to a prohibitive level and make the procedure less affordable to prospective parents by IVF. Apparently speaking for IVF providers in the state, the Alabama Medical Association argued that providers would be held liable for routine treatment of ectopic pregnancies, a proposition that the LePage majority categorically rejected. The association made blanket assertions that treating extrauterine human embryos as children for the purposes of wrongful death liability would “substantially increase the cost of IVF in Alabama,” would “make cryogenic preservation onerous,” and that “costs and storage issues would be prohibitive;” but it presented no evidence whatsoever to that effect. National Review columnist Ed Whelan called such unproven claims a “massive bluff” on the part of IVF providers.

As soon as the ruling was issued, Alabama IVF providers, including unlikely institutions such as the University of Alabama at Birmingham, voluntarily suspended their IVF services. They blamed the Alabama Supreme Court decision in LePage, which did not remotely suggest such action. Providers and Democratic politicians also blamed the Dobbs decision, which had no relation whatsoever to IVF access, as correctly pointed out by Ed Whelan.

The Associated Press reported that IVF providers “traveled to Montgomery to urge lawmakers to find a solution,” promising to resume their activities as soon as the state legislature passed a law reversing the ruling. In the mainstream press, Alabama providers who admittedly maintained low standards for extrauterine embryo care and preservation, claimed that they would be victimized by the LePage ruling and forced either to close down, or to increase the already high costs of their operations. The judgment would also harm thousands of individuals and couples who would lose access to biological parenthood, especially those identifying as LGBT, the progressive media claimed.

Hit pieces were published against Alabama Chief Justice Thomas Parker in leftist media such as NPR, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the New York Times. Even though he did not write the majority opinion, Justice Parker was targeted and subjected to ad hominem attacks against his person and his faith. Leftist journalists deplored his pro-life concurring opinion; they also took the opportunity to condemn his conservative stance on same-sex marriage and his legacy of pro-life decisions during his tenure as Chief Justice and as Supreme Court judge. That legacy includes Hamilton v. Scott II (2018) and Ex Parte Phillips (2012), which attacked Roe v. Wade and recognized the personhood of unborn children; it also includes Stinnett v. Kennedy (2016), in which he argued that unborn children are entitled to equal protection of the law under the constitutions of the United States and Alabama. Likewise, in Ex Parte Hicks, a 2014 judgment, he pointed out the logical fallacy of treating the unborn child as a distinct person in some respects and yet denying them full personhood in abortion cases, a principle that he applied in protecting the unborn child’s rights in chemical endangerment cases such as Ex Parte Ankrom and Kimbrough.

Justice Parker’s powerful concurrence in LePage made relevant references to multiple Christian theologians of various denominations to explain the meaning of the Sanctity of Unborn Life Amendment to the Alabama Constitution. His references to the Christian origins of the constitutional amendment were ridiculed with special viciousness and characterized as Christian nationalism by the leftist press, an idea that Ryan Anderson refuted in First Things.

Astonishingly, President Joe Biden used his State of the Union Address to specifically condemn the LePage ruling. He and U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer invited as guests to the event two female IVF users whose embryo transfers had been unilaterally canceled by their IVF providers. The women were presented as victims of the Alabama Supreme Court, rather than victims of their own IVF providers who unilaterally halted services and exerted unethical, undue pressure on their patients to protest the ruling on their behalf. As a result, in Alabama, parents who had conceived children by IVF unwittingly protested against parents’ rights to compensation for the wrongful death of their embryonic children and their right to render IVF clinics accountable for their destruction, perhaps without truthful knowledge of the court’s actual holding.

The majority Republican legislature yielded in less than fifteen days after the February 20 judgment. It approved the act and the Republican governor signed it into law on March 6, apparently intimidated by election year considerations, political pressure from the Left and mainstream media, and the Alabama IVF providers’ strike over the recognition of human embryos as children. The new law’s affirmative grant of civil and criminal immunity for IVF providers who fail to properly handle and preserve human embryos, however, does not benefit parents who use IVF or children conceived in it; it solely benefits the IVF industry, as pro-life leaders have pointed out. These leaders include people like Marjorie Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, along with representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention, March for Life Action, and Family Research Council, who urged the Alabama governor to veto the legislation.

The act gives IVF providers absolute legal immunity from any civil or criminal action against embryo tampering or destruction. It prevents parents from seeking any remedies other than limited reimbursement from some IVF equipment manufacturers and requires no minimum due care for the lives of human embryos. The act’s broad and imprecise language suggests that Alabama IVF providers are now free to damage, manipulate, dispose of, or otherwise destroy any human embryos, whether cryopreserved or in vivo, intentionally or negligently, with or without parental consent, and in complete impunity.

If unchallenged, the law would reverse the portion of the LePage decision that grants parents a right of action against IVF providers for the wrongful death of their own embryos. The act’s retroactivity provision, which applies to any actions or omissions resulting in embryonic death or damage before the passage of the law, would also preempt enforcement of the judgment by the three married couples who were plaintiffs in the lawsuit and foreclose their option of obtaining wrongful death remedies for the death of their embryonic children.

The act did not, however, explicitly overturn the decision in its entirety or adopt any provisions contrary to the finding that extrauterine human embryos created in vitro are children, whether cryopreserved or not. Alabama Supreme Court precedents holding that unborn children are “children” for the purposes of Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor statute (e.g. Mack v. Carmack and Hamilton v. Scott) are not affected by this law, either.

Alabama, a pro-life state with a pro-life constitution that specifically recognizes the sanctity of unborn life and ensures “the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate” (Art. I, §36.06) will continue to prevail over legislative acts such as SB159. Alabama’s fetal homicide statute, the Brody Act, will continue to outlaw the killing of an unborn child in utero, even in capital murder cases such as Ex parte Phillips. Under Boone v. Mullendore, Alabama will continue to reject “wrongful birth” actions because of its Sanctity of Unborn Life Amendment.

The passage of Act SB159, however, undermined an important pro-life state supreme court judgment, setting a negative precedent for the finality of other pro-life judgments and even pro-life legislation in general. Immediately after Act SB159’s passage, the IVF industry in Alabama, supported by Democrats, seized momentum and tried to destroy Alabama’s recognition of the unborn child’s personhood. Alabama House Democrats proposed legislation declaring that an extrauterine human embryo cannot be considered an unborn child or human being under state law, arguing that it was the most “direct way” to deal with the issue. Republicans reportedly prevented the proposal from being brought up for a vote.

Republican confusion about the actual holding in LePage led to unfortunate consequences for party unity on pro-life issues. Notably, former president Donald Trump released a video statement on abortion and IVF rejecting a hypothetical nationwide ban on abortion and condemning an IVF ban that the Alabama Supreme Court never ordered. In it, President Trump congratulated the Alabama legislature for acting “very quickly” in passing the IVF provider immunity law and doing a “really great and fast job,” stating he “strongly support[s] the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby,” apparently under the incorrect assumption that the Alabama judgment had somehow banned it. 

Curiously, such statements seem to heed President Biden’s call to Republicans in his State of the Union to support legislation that would “guarantee the right to IVF nationwide.” In addition to the presidential nominee, other Republicans seem to agree: U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, for instance, proposed a nonbinding federal resolution treating IVF as a reproductive right, and U.S. Rep. Marc Molinaro co-sponsored one of three bills recognizing a legal right to IVF proposed by Democratic congresswomen.

Whether supporting the creation of a right to IVF will help Republicans win votes remains unclear; the next federal and state elections may give an inkling of it. In the meantime, conservatives can nevertheless choose not to react to every provocation that the Left throws their way, or to be sidelined by distracting debates and ideological traps that will force them to make concessions on pro-life or other critical political issues. In particular, as noted by policy analysts like Patrick T. Brown, conservative politicians need not side with the Left on IVF or support liberal agendas.

Conservative lawmakers can certainly agree that the IVF industry needs legal regulation. In LePage, both Chief Justice Parker and Justice Mendheim pointed out that legal scholars consider the United States a Wild West for reproductive technologies, which have gone largely unregulated since their inception in 1978. All justices, including Justice Cook, agreed on “the need for comprehensive regulation” of the IVF industry. In practice, that could mean, for instance, supporting legislation to substitute embryo freezing for gamete (ova or sperm) freezing; this is a more ethical alternative to mass embryonic cryopreservation, according to the Catholic University of Valencia’s Bioethics Observatory.

To expect the IVF industry to regulate itself or to curb its own destruction of embryos in any way seems especially unreasonable as a conservative position. The billion-dollar industry of artificial reproductive technologies creates and destroys more embryos than can possibly be implanted in human wombs, as IVF providers openly admitted in LePage and the publicity campaigns against it. Ordinary IVF processes in the United States today require not only surplus embryo creation but also embryo screening, selection, freezing, eventual disposal, and destruction or donation to embryo-destroying research. Providers’ economic interest in preserving the status quo includes an economic interest in allowing millions of human embryos to be created and destroyed by IVF providers for profit, with no legal consequences.

The new Alabama law can ironically be a good starting point for a consensus that conservatives should not promote broad immunity and impunity for embryo destruction, nor support the abolition of a parental right of action against IVF providers. The law’s passage is a proper illustration of why conservatives need a principled approach to defend rather than attack pro-life judgments, especially not without careful legal study. Conservatives can choose to coalesce around pro-life courts and support their rulings, to give them the benefit of the doubt rather than distance themselves from them. The Left certainly seems to have greater consensus on that strategy.

Image by nevodka.com and licensed via Adobe Stock.

US military records tell a different story of the WWII incident

US President Joe Biden has claimed that an uncle of his who went missing in the Pacific during the Second World War was eaten by cannibals.

Second Lieutenant Ambrose Finnegan of the US Army Air Forces was declared missing in May 1944, after his light bomber crashed in the sea. 

“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time,” Biden told reporters on the campaign trail outside Air Force One in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “They never recovered his body, but the government went back when I went down there and they checked and found some parts of the plane.”

Several hours later, at a meeting with United Steelworkers union members in Pittsburgh, Biden told the same story.

“He got shot down in New Guinea and they never found the body because there used to be – there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea,” the 81-year-old Democrat said.

According to the Pentagon’s agency for prisoners of war and missing in action (POW-MIA), Finnegan was never shot down, however. Nor was it on a reconnaissance mission, as Biden claimed.

The A-20 Havoc light bomber was on a “courier run” from the Los Negros Island when its engines failed at low altitude, per the official account of the incident. The plane dropped into the sea off the north coast of New Guinea and two out of three crew members never made it out of the sinking wreck, which was never found. The one man who survived was rescued by a passing boat.

Biden has told many fictitious tales about his life over a 50-year career in politics, most famously about getting arrested while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in a South African prison. He has repeated one debunked story about an Amtrak conductor more than a dozen times.

The cannibal claim about Uncle Ambrose, however, served as a springboard for attacking his predecessor – and presumptive challenger – Donald Trump. In the campaign speech in Pittsburgh, Biden told a story about how Trump allegedly refused to honor fallen US soldiers buried in France, calling them “suckers” and “losers.” 

The story first appeared in The Atlantic magazine in September 2020, referring to events in November 2018, at the centenary of the WWI armistice. Trump denied the accusation, calling it “more made up fake news given by disgusting and jealous failures in a disgraceful attempt to influence the 2020 election!”

Documents debunking the Atlantic’s claim surfaced within days, but that has not stopped Democrats from repeatedly bringing it up as if true.

Washington has reportedly signed assurances that the death penalty will not be sought for or imposed on the WikiLeaks founder

Washington has allegedly agreed to a set of conditions regarding the potential trial of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if he is extradited to the US to face espionage charges, several media outlets reported on Tuesday.

The signed guarantees, which have been shared on X by New York Times correspondent Megan Specia, apparently assure that the 52-year-old Australian national would be able to rely on the US Constitution’s first amendment, which protects free speech, would not be prejudiced at trial because of his nationality, and would not face the death penalty if convicted.

It’s noted, however, that while these assurances are “binding,” the decision on the “applicability of the First Amendment” would be “exclusively within the purview of the US courts.”

Washington’s promises come after the British High Court in London ruled last month that if the US failed to provide these guarantees, then Assange would be able to appeal against his extradition to the US to stand trial for publishing classified military documents.

US has filed assurances in Assange extradition case, which were requested by a British court before it makes a final decision on his ability to appeal. Next step is a hearing on May 20. More on what those assurances are all about in our earlier story here: https://t.co/8ehvD0iHus pic.twitter.com/420CMZP0Wp

Assange has been held in London’s top-security Belmarsh Prison for the past five years. He was initially arrested by British police in 2010 for sexual-offense allegations that he denied. In 2012, Assange jumped bail and was granted asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He was arrested again in 2019 when Ecuador revoked his asylum, and has remained in Belmarsh ever since.

The US, meanwhile, continues to demand that he be extradited to American soil to stand trial on 17 counts of espionage, over the publication of classified Pentagon military documents in 2010 that detailed alleged US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange faces up to 175 years in prison if extradited and convicted.

His legal team as well as his supporters have claimed that the case against him is political in nature and is being waged by the West as revenge for exposing its alleged war crimes. 

His attorneys have also been insistent against the sought extradition of Assange to the US, arguing that it would put his life and well-being at risk, and have previously dismissed any assurances given by Washington as meaningless, claiming it would be impossible to rely on them if their client is actually extradited.

Soviet-designed T-72s were intended to replace Kiev’s battlefield losses

It is unclear how many tanks of the Soviet T-72 design the Polish military currently operates, because the public doesn’t know how many Warsaw has donated to Kiev, military analyst Damian Ratka has said.

Ratka’s comments came during an 80-minute video event about the future of Polish armor, hosted by the news portal Defence24. 

“We don’t really know how many T-72 tanks we have, because we don’t know exactly how many of them were transferred to Ukraine,” Ratka said. Kiev probably received at least 30 to 60 vehicles, but the actual numbers are not publicly available, he added.

Ratka’s estimates match what then-PM Mateusz Morawiecki promised to send Ukraine in January 2023: 60 tanks in total, half of them T-72M1 and the other half PT-91 Twardy, the Polish upgrade of the Soviet-era MBT. However, at the time Morawiecki also said that Poland had supplied “about 250” T-72s to Ukraine.

Warsaw first announced it had donated some of its T-72s in April 2022, but would not give any numbers. Prior to that, the Czech Republic and Slovakia had already supplied Kiev with Soviet-era armor, intended to replace the vehicles lost in the battles with the Russian military.

Morawiecki also pledged to send 14 of the German-made Leopard 2 vehicles to Kiev, later clarifying that the promise was intended to pressure Berlin into doing the same. It was unclear whether any Polish Leopards were actually sent to Ukraine.

Hyped by the Western and Ukrainian press as wonder-weapons that would win the war, the Leopards ended up getting destroyed in large numbers during the Zaporozhye offensive last summer.

Speaking about the future of Polish armored forces, Ratka noted that Warsaw is operating some T-72s and PT-91s still, as well as three versions of the Leopard 2 and an unspecified number of the US-made Abrams and South Korean K2 ‘Black Panther’ MBTs.

Poland has made plans to buy more than 350 Abrams tanks, including 250 of the newer M1A2 model, Ratka said, as well as 180 or so K2s. Credit problems have troubled the planned purchase from Seoul, however.

Ratka added that Poland was planning to shut down the facilities producing spare parts for the Soviet legacy systems, as it could not manufacture some of the key components, such as turrets and engines. The fate of the remaining T-72s and PT-91s was uncertain, he noted, suggesting that they might end up being sent to Ukraine as well.