Weapons shipments turn a Polish city into a boom town

Armoured vehicles pepper the tarmac. Patriot missile batteries, which America deployed here in March, scan the skies overhead. Military planes touch down, offload their cargo and take off, almost around the clock. Inside the arrivals hall a couple of foreign volunteers to fight in Ukraine, including a former American soldier, collect their luggage. The airport just north of Rzeszow, a city in south-eastern Poland, used to handle only a few flights a day. Vladimir Putin’s war has transformed it into the main entrepot for Western weapons destined for Ukraine. It has also transformed Rzeszow itself.

At the start of the year Rzeszow, an hour by train from the Ukrainian border, was the 15th-biggest city in Poland with a population just under 200,000. Since then about 100,000 refugees have arrived; depending on how many have stayed, it may now be the tenth-biggest. Ukrainians are not the only newcomers. Foreign diplomats, American troops and aid workers crowd the hotels and restaurants. A waitress is surprised when a customer speaks Polish.