The modernization of Poland’s land forces has reached a decisive stage. After several years of development and testing, the first production Borsuk infantry fighting vehicles were delivered to the Polish Armed Forces in December 2025. The initial batch of 15 vehicles was delivered under a contract signed on March 27, 2025, covering 111 vehicles as well as training and logistics support.
The program moved to a new scale on May 30, 2026, with another contract covering 146 Borsuk vehicles, valued at approximately PLN 7.5 billion before tax, or roughly €1.7 billion. The order confirms the transition from a development program to the gradual establishment of a sizable fleet.
Behind these numbers, however, lies a more significant question than the number of vehicles ordered. The Borsuk was designed to combine firepower, tracked mobility, infantry transport, and the ability to cross water obstacles under its own power.
That requirement directly shapes its architecture at a time when the war in Ukraine has brought armored vehicle protection, mobility, and availability back to the forefront. The Borsuk therefore raises a broader question: how can an amphibious capability be preserved without compromising survivability?
The Borsuk sits at the center of an issue that extends well beyond the Polish program: how to balance mobility, protection, and water-crossing capability in an environment where no level of armor alone can guarantee survivability.
An amphibious vehicle built around a trade-off
The Borsuk is intended to replace part of Poland’s aging fleet of Soviet-era infantry fighting vehicles. This transition represents a generational shift while retaining one important characteristic: amphibious capability.
In its baseline configuration, the vehicle weighs approximately 28 tons. It carries a crew of three and six dismounted infantry personnel. It can reach approximately 65 kilometers per hour on roads and cross water obstacles under its own power.
Its armament is integrated into a Polish-developed remote-controlled turret. The system includes a 30 mm cannon, a 7.62 mm machine gun, and two Spike anti-tank guided missiles. According to the Polish Ministry of National Defense, the weapon system can engage infantry, armored vehicles, and certain aerial targets.
Amphibious capability is an integral part of the vehicle’s design. Adding protection generally increases weight, while maintaining buoyancy requires tight control over both the vehicle’s mass and overall volume.
Polish authorities have themselves acknowledged this trade-off during discussions surrounding the program. The amphibious Borsuk configuration does not seek to provide the same level of protection as a non-amphibious heavy infantry fighting vehicle. Its architecture, however, is intended to accommodate additional protection when operational requirements do not call for amphibious crossings.
Ukraine is broadening the definition of survivability
The fighting in Ukraine has made the operating environment for mechanized forces considerably more demanding. Drone surveillance, mines, indirect fires, and anti-tank weapons complicate movement and make concentrations of vehicles particularly vulnerable. Research published in 2025, drawing on interviews and observations involving Ukrainian formations, nevertheless found that armored vehicles remain important when employed on a limited scale to provide protection and firepower.
Studies of Ukrainian offensive operations have also highlighted how the design of Western armored vehicles can reduce personnel casualties even when the vehicles themselves are damaged or lost. Those same studies, however, emphasize the importance of recovering, repairing, and sustaining these platforms over time.
More recent observations point in the same direction. Ukrainian crews interviewed by the Royal United Services Institute have emphasized mobility, endurance, and repairability. A heavily protected vehicle that is difficult to recover or return to service can quickly suffer declining availability.
This distinction is fundamental to understanding the Borsuk.
Survivability can no longer be reduced to the amount of armor that can be fitted to a vehicle. It also depends on the ability to limit exposure, reposition quickly, operate across difficult terrain, accommodate additional protection, and return to service rapidly after sustaining damage.
The proliferation of drones reinforces this shift. Ukraine’s experience has highlighted the need to protect vehicles and their crews against attacks from above without making the platform so heavy or cumbersome that its mobility is significantly degraded.
It would therefore be an overstatement to argue that the war in Ukraine has made the Borsuk’s amphibious capability obsolete.
The issue becomes even more relevant as Poland simultaneously explores configurations that may not be built around the same amphibious requirement, as well as a heavier category of infantry fighting vehicle.
Such a combination could allow Poland to distribute priorities across its force structure: some units could retain a high degree of independent water-crossing capability, while others could receive greater protection for operations alongside heavy armored formations. It remains too early, however, to consider such an organizational model definitive.
Russia’s third-generation Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty, or BMP-3, provides a useful point of comparison. The amphibious tracked vehicle weighs approximately 18.7 tons, carries seven infantry personnel in addition to its three-person crew, and can reach 10 kilometers per hour in the water. Its armament includes a 100 mm gun and a 30 mm cannon.
The BMP-3 and Borsuk should not, however, be assessed solely on the basis of these figures. They belong to different generations and reflect different architectures and requirements. The comparison is useful primarily because it illustrates the persistence of the same fundamental challenge: combining water-crossing capability, firepower, mobility, and protection within a single platform.
The war in Ukraine has now added another dimension to this equation: the ubiquity of drones and the need to adapt vehicles rapidly. Russian forces have been compelled to develop additional protective measures and modify their operating practices in response to this threat, sometimes at the expense of amphibious capability.
This comparison takes on particular significance given Russian armored vehicle attrition in Ukraine. According to Oryx’s open-source database, which only records equipment losses supported by photographic or video evidence, nearly 800 Russian BMP-3s had been documented as destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured by the end of 2025: 624 destroyed, 24 damaged, 82 abandoned, and 68 captured.
Russian vehicles have operated for several years in an environment combining mines, artillery, anti-tank weapons, and drones. This experience above all demonstrates that an infantry fighting vehicle employed over an extended period in high-intensity warfare must be assessed on more than its mobility and firepower alone.
The Borsuk’s second challenge is industrial
The program’s success will also be determined far from the battlefield: on production lines, in maintenance facilities, and at training centers.
The May 30, 2026 contract for 146 vehicles confirms that the industrial dimension is becoming increasingly important. With successive orders now in place, Poland must transform a domestically developed platform into a fleet that can be produced, equipped, and sustained over the long term.
For the Borsuk, performance demonstrated during testing therefore represents only part of the equation. Spare-parts availability, training for crews and maintenance personnel, equipment modularity, and the industrial capacity to absorb repairs and modernization will also determine the vehicle’s long-term military value.
Three factors will now help determine the program’s success: how protection evolves, particularly if heavier configurations emerge; the pace of industrial production following the order for another 146 vehicles in May 2026; and the relationship with future heavier vehicles, which could lead Poland to distribute amphibious capability and protection according to different operational requirements.
The Borsuk therefore does not settle the debate between protection and mobility. The experience of Ukraine instead suggests that survivability now depends on a combination of protection, mobility, repairability, availability, and adaptability. The Borsuk will ultimately be judged on how successfully it balances those requirements and on the ability of Poland’s defense industry to evolve that balance over time.
