After massive Russian rocket attacks on western Ukraine - Poland has more than 60,000 bunkers checked

Created: 10/10/2022, 8:47 p.m

By: Patrick Mayer

Russia is bombing Ukraine massively, including Lviv in the west of the country.

Neighbor Poland now wants to check all air raid shelters.

An accident?

Munich/Warsaw/Kyiv - In the middle of rush hour shortly after 8 a.m., they hit several Ukrainian cities - an estimated 80 Russian rockets.

It is the heaviest bombardment on the civilian population in the Ukraine war in just one day, which happened on Monday (October 10).

Ukraine War: Massive Russian bombing of Kyiv, Dnipro and Lviv

Civilian infrastructure was hit in the capital Kyiv, where people recently felt safe, as well as in the megacities of Kharkiv and Dnipro.

But Russian rockets also hit Lviv in the east of the country.

The preliminary sad balance overall: As of Monday evening, 7 p.m., at least eleven dead and more than 80 injured.

Alarming: Lviv is only about 70 kilometers from the Polish border.

In the coming weeks, Poland will check all of the bunkers and shelters in the country - more than 62,000 in number.

According to Warsaw, the action has been planned for a long time and the timing of the massive Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities is coincidental.

“The firefighters check what condition they are in, how they are equipped, whether they are operational.

If this is not the case, we will take measures to make them operational again," said Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Wasik, according to the "Tagesschau" broadcaster Polsat News.

This will take about two months.

Because of the Ukraine war: Poland has more than 60,000 bunkers and shelters checked

The minister made it clear: "We are in NATO, we are part of the EU.

We are not involved in this war, although we strongly support Ukraine, but Poland is a safe country.” Since the Russian attack, Germany's neighbor has taken in around 1.3 million Ukrainian refugees, while its own country has around 38.5 million inhabitants counts.

As the radio station Radio Polskie 24 reported in early May, the Polish government had already given Ukraine more than 200 T-72 main battle tanks by that time.

As well as dozens of other armored and armed military vehicles, such as BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles.

Poland's distrust of Moscow has grown historically.

At the end of the 18th century, the then fragile noble republic of Poland was invaded by the Russian tsarist empire, the Austrian Habsburgs and the German Prussians and divided into three parts.

In 1815, after the Congress of Vienna, large parts of today's (north)western Poland around Posen went to Prussia, Galicia around Kraków to the Habsburg Empire and the center of the country around Warsaw to Russia as the Protectorate of Congress Poland.

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Poland: Concerns about Russia have grown historically

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Red Army of the Soviet Union, coming from the east, invaded the country parallel to the German Wehrmacht.

At that time terrible war crimes were committed by the Red Army soldiers.

After World War II, the country became part of the Warsaw Pact as the People's Republic of Poland, complete with a communist dictatorship largely controlled from Moscow.