Introduction
In 2022, Poland signed a series of framework agreements with the South Korean defence contractors Hyundai Rotem, Hanwha and Korea Aerospace covering K2 Black Panther tanks, K9 Thunder howitzers , Chunmoo rocket artillery and FA-50 combat aircraft , worth an estimated USD 14.5 billion, close to the total of Poland’s defence budget for that year (Głowacki, 2022). The purchase followed Poland’s decision to send a large portion of its Soviet-era stock of T-72 and PT-91 Twardys to Ukraine (Głowacki, 2022). By 2022, Poland had become South Korea’s largest arms market, accounting for $13.7 billion of the USD 17 billion in arms deals Seoul recorded that year (Głowacki, 2022). At the same time, Poland became the largest applicant to the SAFE fund, which allows the Commission to lend up to €150 billion to member states for defence-industrial investment (Council of the European Union, 2025, Art. 6). By the time the Commission’s initial window for expressions of interest closed in July 2025, eighteen Member States had signalled a combined €127 billion in indicative demand (European Commission, 2025). Poland alone applied for approximately €45 billion, more than any other country (Euronews, 2025). Poland was allocated €43.7 billion, the largest amount awarded to a single Member State (Defence Matters, 2026; Głowacki, 2026). Yet these figures support two contrasting interpretations. Warsaw is buying combat-ready equipment from outside the Union at a pace European industry cannot match, while asking the Union to help finance the industrial base that this pattern leaves out.12 34
This paper treats Poland’s turn to South Korea not as an isolated emergency purchase, but as a case that exposes a structural feature of European rearmament. South Korean equipment addressed an urgent capability and delivery gap, supplying off-the-shelf, NATO-interoperable systems on a timeline that European suppliers could not match, but doing so came at a cost. Article 16, paragraph 10, of the Council Regulation on the establishment of SAFE outlines the rule that at least 65% of a funded project’s value must originate in the EU, EEA or Ukraine (Regulation 2025/1106), putting that fast, externally sourced route on a different track from the EU’s own industrial-integration goals, one that this paper returns to throughout.
This tension raises a broader question that this paper argues underlies the EU’s assessments of its defence-industrial integration since 2022 (Fiott, 2023): if EU member states keep turning to fast, external suppliers whenever a capability gap opens, what does that pattern mean for the long-term health of the European defence-industrial base? The paper uses the K2 programme to examine that question, focusing on the April 2026 agreement between the Polish state-owned plant Bumar-Łabędy and Hyundai Rotem to begin assembling the Polish K2PL variant domestically under licence, rather than importing it fully built from South Korea.
About the author
Lucía Ruiz Yunta is a Defence and Security Research Trainee at Finabel