Poland Enters Final Negotiations With Italy on Training-and-Combat Helicopters Under SAFE Joint Procurement
Warsaw, 15 September 2026
Key points
- After meeting Guido Crosetto in Warsaw on 15 September, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said: "We want to buy training-and-combat helicopters as quickly as possible and Italy is an important partner for us here. We are entering the final phase of negotiations on this"
- On industry: "It is very important for us that production takes place in Poland, and I received such assurances from the minister"; he pointed to Italian firms' investments in Świdnik employing thousands
- He placed the purchase in "phase two of the SAFE mechanism", in which Poland is agreeing joint purchases with partner states, the tanker-transport aircraft with Spain being the one already settled; the helicopters are "one of the needs defined by the Polish army, written into the SAFE mechanism"
- The minister named no type, number or value and nothing was signed; Polish trade reporting puts the requirement at 24 aircraft and the Italian candidate as Leonardo's AW109 TrekkerM from PZL-Świdnik, against the Airbus H145M
Poland's defence minister says negotiations with Italy on a training-and-combat helicopter are in their final phase, under the joint-procurement track of the EU's SAFE loans, with an assurance from his Italian counterpart that the aircraft would be built in Poland.
The requirement is for a light armed helicopter to train crews and fly combat support alongside the army's incoming attack fleet. Polish reporting ahead of the meeting described a two-way contest between Leonardo's TrekkerM, offered through its PZL-Świdnik subsidiary, and the H145M, and a minister who wanted a decision this year because SAFE requires delivery and settlement by 31 December 2030. PZL-Świdnik's management has said it could deliver 24 aircraft by the end of June 2030. Neither defence ministry has published a type, and no Crosetto statement on the helicopters is on record.
The instrument is the point. SAFE's common-procurement track needs at least one partner state. Poland has used it twice so far, for A330 MRTT tankers through Spain's framework and for Piorun missiles with Norway and two Baltic partners, against more than PLN 120 billion contracted alone.
A final phase announced with a government, not a bidder, means the financing instrument has settled the competition before any evaluation was published. The joint track needs a partner state, Italy qualifies and brings a plant Leonardo already owns in Lublin province, and the end-2030 deadline leaves no room for a contested tender. That is a defensible way to buy 24 light helicopters. It is also a template in which the partner state's role is to make a national purchase eligible, which is not the pooled demand the track was written for; in the Piorun case the partners at least order missiles. Signal No. 146 records that no document was signed. When one is, the line to read is whether Italy buys a single aircraft under it.
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