Poland’s epic gold-buying spree may have had a secret wartime agenda all along

After the president unveiled a rival rearmament plan to be financed by the central bank that amassed the bullion, speculation is growing that Poland’s vast gold reserves could play a pivotal role.

While attention is fixed on the Middle East, another, quieter fault line is opening inside Europe.

This one is not about missiles or battlefields, but about the financial plumbing of rearmament. In Poland, President Karol Nawrocki and central-bank governor Adam Glapiński are now openly discussing a domestic alternative to the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) programme defence-loan scheme — a workaround designed, in their telling, to preserve national discretion over procurement and avoid the political conditions they say come with Brussels-backed money.

The row matters because it points toward something larger than a technical funding dispute: the possibility that Poland’s rearmament could begin to split along competing European and American vectors, according to partisan leanings at home.

The immediate trigger is the president’s new “Polish SAFE 0%” concept. Nawrocki, a historian who was previously the director of the Museum of the Second World War, has said he wants a home-grown mechanism, worked out with the National Bank of Poland. His aim is to finance defence purchases without drawing on the EU programme, which is gearing up to limit access to U.S.-made arms.

As currently pitched, the EU’s SAFE programme is a €150 billion defence-financing instrument designed to accelerate Europe’s rearmament after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Under the scheme, the European Commission raises money on capital markets and lends it to member states through long-term, low-interest loans, with repayment periods of up to 45 years and a 10-year grace period on principal.

The loans are intended primarily for joint procurement and defence-industrial investment, and the rules require that at least 65 percent of the value of funded contracts originate in the EU, the EEA or Ukraine, reflecting the programme’s goal of strengthening Europe’s own defence industry. The first wave of projects has now been cleared and the initial loan disbursements are expected during 2026, with Poland set to be the largest beneficiary, seeking roughly €43–44 billion in financing.

Some commentators, such as Rabobank’s Michael Every, have compared the programme to the Nazis’ MEFO bill system, which was an off-balance-sheet financing mechanism used in the 1930s to fund Germany’s rapid rearmament through government-backed promissory notes that could be discounted at the central bank.

Nawrocki, on the other hand, is keen to create an investment process built around NBP reserves, ideally, in a way that will not directly “deplete” them. Glapiński has likewise said any proposal from the bank would not reduce Poland’s foreign-exchange reserves and suggested that central-bank profits could play a role.

Crucially, Nawrocki and his allies have cast the EU scheme as politically constraining, arguing it could bias procurement toward European suppliers and away from U.S. kit; Nawrocki has explicitly said a domestic scheme would preserve flexibility to buy items such as F-35s and ammunition.

The 550 tonne backstory

Glapiński, however, is not just a technocrat in this drama, but one of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s enduring political antagonists.

Poland’s current political landscape is defined by a rivalry between Donald Tusk’s pro-EU Civic Platform–led coalition government and the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) camp, which retains influence through the presidency and several state institutions.
While Tusk’s government prioritises deeper integration with EU structures, PiS and its allies emphasise national sovereignty, closer security ties with the United States and a more sceptical stance toward Brussels.

Key to the backstory is that Tusk’s camp moved in 2024 to bring the NBP governor before a state tribunal over bond-buying, rate-cut timing and other alleged abuses linked to his supposed political loyalty to the rival PiS administration.

But the effort became entangled in Poland’s wider constitutional trench warfare, with PiS allies, the Constitutional Tribunal and even the ECB, pushing back on the grounds of central-bank independence. The result is that Glapiński remains in place, still able to act as a counter-pole to Tusk inside the Polish state.

That makes the current SAFE fight more than a policy disagreement: it is another front in the cohabitation war between a pro-EU government and institutions still partly controlled by the nationalist camp.

The financing proposal is contentious for obvious legal and market reasons. Poland’s finance minister, Andrzej Domański, has warned that defence funding cannot depend on one-off operations and noted that the budget has not received NBP profit transfers for three years. Polish commentators and economists have gone further, arguing that any structure that channels central-bank balance-sheet gains into state spending risks colliding with constitutional and treaty principles barring monetary financing.

Polish daily Rzeczpospolita described the emerging proposal as a potentially dangerous precedent that could hit NBP credibility.

ING’s Polish economists nonetheless say the most plausible mechanism is a sell-buy-back operation on the gold book, which would crystallise the bank’s substantial gains while trying to preserve the headline level of reserves.

That is why gold sits at the centre of market speculation. Publicly, Glapiński has ruled out simply running down reserves. But the Polish press, Reuters, and ING all point in the same direction: not outright depletion, but some form of collateralized operation that monetises the increase in the gold portfolio’s value.

Bloomberg reported that people familiar with the matter saw a proposal to generate up to 48 billion zloty from gold reserves for defence spending; Reuters then reported that advisers around Nawrocki were talking about using profits linked to the rising value of the NBP’s gold holdings.

ING’s economists interpret Glapiński’s own remarks as pointing toward a sale-and-repurchase structure that would realise gains without formally changing reserve levels.

There is substance behind the idea that gold could play some role because Glapiński has spent years imbuing Poland’s bullion with political, not merely portfolio, meaning. One need only check out the NBP’s promotional materials online to detect the not-at-all-subtle dog whistling over the role the central bank’s gold is intended to play. As the central bank puts it in its own commentary:

“The National Bank of Poland has significantly bolstered the country's economic resilience by accumulating over 530 tonnes of gold. These substantial reserves are intended to enhance the nation's financial credibility on the global stage while ensuring long-term monetary stability. By investing in this precious metal, the central bank aims to provide a secure foundation for the future of the homeland. This strategic move serves as a safeguard for the value of the national currency during uncertain times. Ultimately, the acquisition of gold is presented as a vital contribution to national security and institutional strength.”

And there’s plenty more from where that came from. Below is a screenshot from an NBP video that highlights that Poland was set to overtake the ECB’s total gold holdings.

Here, meanwhile, is a screenshot of Glapinski promoting his gold strategy while standing in the Polish gold vaults. That was nearly two years ago:

Across the board, the messaging shows how central the gold story has become to the governor’s public narrative. Moreover, the policy has certainly borne fruit. As of early 2026, Poland had amassed about 550 tonnes of gold, up from 359 tonnes after purchases in 2018–2023.

Glapiński has explicitly said the bank wants to lift that toward 700 tonnes.

The NBP profit saga

Key to any potential arms financing set-up is how all the gold that sits on the NBP’s balance sheet has hitherto been accounted for.

The question is not purely technical. It lies at the heart of a political dispute that erupted in 2024, when Donald Tusk’s coalition sought to bring central bank governor Adam Glapiński before Poland’s State Tribunal. Among the accusations advanced by government allies was that the central bank had provided misleading signals about its expected financial result — initially indicating that little or no profit would be available for transfer to the state budget, before later declaring a roughly 6 billion złoty profit.

Because part of the NBP’s profit can be transferred to the treasury, critics argued that the late appearance of the gain raised questions about whether the central bank had searched its balance sheet for distributable profits at a politically sensitive moment during the final months of the Law and Justice (PiS) government.

The accounting issue quickly became a central point of contention. Opponents of Glapiński suggested the reported profit might have relied on valuation gains — particularly foreign-exchange gains — that under EU statistical rules are normally treated as unrealised and therefore not distributable to the government. The implication was that the central bank may have presented such gains in a way that made the government’s fiscal position appear stronger.

At the time, however, the numbers raised as many questions as they answered. In correspondence with the NBP in early 2024, I myself noted that officials in the finance ministry themselves appeared uncertain what had generated the reported profit, assuming it must have stemmed from foreign-exchange gains that would normally not qualify as distributable income under ESA-2010 rules.

That opacity led me to consider an alternative explanation: that the profit might instead have been linked to gains on the NBP’s gold holdings. I put the case to the NBP in an email on February 7, 2024:

The only thing I can think of that might have contributed to the gain at that point in August and then (as confirmed to me by the finance ministry reconfirmed as recently as December) which WASN’T an FX gain, is a gain on gold.

I am however struggling to understand the accounting for gold gains, and was wondering if someone at the NBP could definitively answer to me how gold gains are accounted and if they would count as operating gains or one off mark-to-market gains.

The NBP declined to comment on the ministry’s assumptions, stating only that its financial results were calculated according to accounting guidelines aligned with ECB standards. Both the finance ministry and the NBP also declined to clarify whether gold had played any role in the reported result.

I have since learned, however, that the accounting treatment of gold, unlike foreign-exchange valuation changes, can involve greater discretion in how and when gains are recognised or realised on the balance sheet.

Seen in hindsight, the episode may shed light on why the accounting question became so politically sensitive. If a significant share of the NBP’s balance-sheet gains derives from the revaluation of its gold reserves — which have risen sharply in value as Poland accumulated bullion — then the timing of when those gains are recognised could materially affect when they become usable as distributable profits.

In that context, the apparent evasiveness surrounding the profit breakdown may not simply have reflected political infighting between Warsaw’s rival camps. It may also have reflected a desire on both sides to avoid revealing too much about how those gold-linked gains might eventually be deployed. Notably, when they may be transferred to the fiscal budget and, more pertinently, when they might not be.

Custody matters

But there is also the question of custody. In its public communications, the NBP frequently emphasises that Poland’s gold reserves are deliberately split between domestic vaults and major international custodians, most notably the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The bank presents this arrangement not simply as a portfolio-management choice but as part of a broader national security strategy. The same logic, it says, underpins the rapid accumulation of gold itself: bullion is framed less as a reserve asset and more as a safeguard for the state in periods of geopolitical uncertainty.

The wartime analogy matters here because Glapiński himself has enthusiastically encouraged it.

During a press conference in January 2024, he highlighted his fascination with the role Polish gold played in financing the resistance during World War 2, including the fact that he had written a screenplay on the subject.

The NBP’s own historical material confirms the broad outline of the story: as Poland was invaded in 1939, the gold was moved out through Romania, then via Istanbul and Beirut to France.

After France’s collapse it was diverted to West Africa, and after further political and logistical struggles portions of it ended up in London, New York and Ottawa. NBP’s archive states that wartime gold was also sold to the Polish government-in-exile to finance war expenditure. In other words, the governor’s favored historical episode is not merely about safekeeping. It is explicitly about gold as a strategic asset in wartime state survival.

The positioning of the gold is also critical to the strategy because custody is not the same thing as ownership. Whoever physically holds the gold ultimately decides which government it is willing to recognise as the legitimate claimant.

For Poland, this became painfully clear after the war. When the Western Allies formally recognised the Soviet-backed Polish government in Warsaw in July 1945, they simultaneously withdrew recognition from the Polish government-in-exile in London — despite strong protests from the latter, which viewed the decision as a betrayal.

Once diplomatic recognition shifted, so too did the legal control over the gold. Western-held reserves were gradually transferred to the new communist authorities, even though rival claims from the exile government lingered for years and disputes over certain assets dragged on well into the post-war period.

The consequences were not merely symbolic. The communist regime used Poland’s remaining gold reserves as part of its early economic stabilisation efforts and to fund currency reforms, eventually selling much of the stockpile in the process. By the early Cold War years, the bullion that had once underwritten Poland’s wartime survival had largely disappeared from the national balance sheet.

The episode illustrates the uncomfortable reality at the heart of sovereign gold reserves: the key question is not simply who owns the metal, but who controls the vault and whom they recognise as the rightful government when the claim is contested. In the Polish case, the Western custodians ultimately decided that question by aligning their decision with the new diplomatic order.

That is why the Venezuelan precedent is worth recalling. When Caracas sued the Bank of England in 2020 to gain access to roughly $2 billion of gold held in London, the dispute quickly turned on a political question rather than a purely financial one: which government Britain recognised as legitimate after supposedly fraudulent elections. British courts ultimately sided with the UK government’s position that opposition leader Juan Guaidó — not Nicolás Maduro — was Venezuela’s lawful president, following the widely disputed 2018 election. As a result, only officials appointed by Guaidó could legally instruct the Bank regarding the reserves, leaving the gold effectively frozen in the Bank of England’s vaults.

This may now change. After the U.S.-backed removal of Nicolás Maduro in January 2026 and the installation of a transitional government, however, Washington has begun restoring diplomatic ties and opening Venezuela’s oil and mining sectors to foreign investment — including authorising limited transactions involving Venezuelan gold.

Nonetheless, the dispute highlights the same principle that haunted Poland after the war: custody is power. Whoever holds the gold, and whichever government the custodian recognises, can become the de facto arbiter of who truly controls a nation’s reserves.

Which is why Glapiński’s repeated emphasis that Polish gold is distributed between domestic vaults and “the best managed vaults in the world” — notably London and New York — carries more meaning than it first appears. It is not merely a portfolio decision. It is also a geopolitical one.

Polonia, quo vadis?

Taken together, the picture that emerges is politically complex but potentially indicative of a broader trend: challenger factions within countries seeking creative ways to assert kinetic and financial power and leverage within — and sometimes against — Brussels. In Poland, the dynamics are fairly simple.

On one side stands Tusk’s government, which wants Poland embedded as deeply as possible in EU financing, legal norms and defence-industrial coordination. On the other stands a presidential-opposition axis that increasingly frames Brussels not as a force multiplier but as a constraint — on sovereignty, procurement and culture.

Reuters reports, for example, that PiS opponents of SAFE explicitly argue that the EU scheme could restrict U.S. arms purchases and enable outside political meddling. At the same time, Nawrocki has already used the Presidential veto and other powers to obstruct core parts of Tusk’s programme, including a key judicial reform bill. Earlier he also vetoed a bill on refugee benefits that the government said was linked to continued Starlink support for Ukraine, and he blocked legislation easing onshore wind-farm development. This is not yet state bifurcation, but it is unmistakably institutional dualism.

The EU context sharpens that split. Brussels has already frozen tens of billions in funds for Poland over rule-of-law concerns under PiS. The funds were only unlocked after Tusk returned to office and promised judicial repair.

The historical memory on the nationalist side is therefore one in which Brussels used money to discipline Warsaw. That memory now feeds directly into the SAFE argument: once financing becomes political leverage, control over the financing channel becomes strategic in its own right.

It’s worth remembering that the dispute over the courts runs deeper than a simple legal quarrel. For PiS and its supporters, the issue has always been bound up with the legacy of Poland’s communist past: many judges who served under the communist regime remained in office after the democratic transition of 1989, and the party has long argued that the post-communist legal establishment retained disproportionate influence over the state. Moreover, this is something Western coverage of the dispute often fails to mention.

Critics, including the European Commission and Poland’s current government, say PiS is only using that argument as a pretext to bring the judiciary under political control. The result is a judicial conflict that is not only constitutional, but also historically rooted in unresolved questions about who truly inherited the authority of the Polish state after communism ended.

Today, the combination of competing centres of authority, divergent geopolitical alignments and a central bank sitting between them with a rapidly expanded gold balance sheet raises the possibility that control over financial resources could become strategically significant.

In other contexts, disputes over central bank assets have contributed to deeper political fractures — as seen in Libya, where rival authorities ultimately split the country’s central banking system along political and military lines.

Another noteworthy point in the context of wider U.S. operations is that Glapiński began building Poland’s reserves well before the recent surge in bullion prices and, according to our sources, may have been encouraged to do so by U.S. officials.

Security and rebasement

Speaking at the Bank of England’s centenary symposium marking Britain’s ill-fated return to the gold standard in 1925 last June, Princeton historian Harold James observed that policymakers have repeatedly turned to gold or hard monetary constraints — from the classical gold standard to mechanisms like the Exchange Rate Mechanism — when trying to restore credibility to currencies and the markets built around them.

James, who is currently working on a history of the Polish złoty, also recounted how even Alan Greenspan once urged Margaret Thatcher to consider such rules-based anchors; Thatcher embraced the idea, describing them as the kind of institutional “spine” needed to underpin a functioning marketplace.

Asked about Polish gold purchases, James suggested that the resurgence of gold accumulation in Central Europe may reflect something simpler: security. He recalled how a Czech central banker once told him their country sold its gold reserves immediately after joining NATO, confident that the alliance would provide the protection bullion once did.

The insinuation, of course, is that reverse logic may now be at work. “When you feel you don’t have security, then you go for gold,” he told me on the sidelines of the symposium. “It’s a nice measure of the degree of political insecurity in the system.”