On Thursday 28 March, the Polish Ministry of Defence announced the appointment of the current First Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Army, Lieutenant-General Piotr Błazeusz, as commander of the Eurocorps based in Strasbourg.
He will replace Lieutenant-General Jarosław Gromadziński, who was dismissed the day before and recalled to Warsaw due to an “inspection procedure concerning [his] personal security clearance” launched by the Military Counter-Intelligence Service “under the Homeland Defence Act of 11 March 2022”.
The Ministry of Defence’s press release referred to “new information about the officer”, but did not give any details as to its nature.
The Polish press, for its part, referred to a possible falsification of reports concerning the state of readiness of the 18th mechanised division created to reinforce Poland’s eastern flank.
When Jarosław Gromadziński took up his post to command Eurocorps last June, he became the first Polish general officer to lead this European army unit of around 1,000 soldiers from six framework nations (France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg and, from January 2022, Poland) and able to command up to 60,000 land forces personnel as part of multinational operations decided by the EU and NATO.
At the time, he emphasised the “cooperative links between the EU and NATO”.
In recent months, he had been part of the international assistance team for Ukraine in Wiesbaden, Germany, where, alongside US military personnel, he had been responsible for training Ukrainian soldiers.
His successor, Lieutenant-General Piotr Błazeusz, will take up his duties on 29 March.
He is considered to be one of the most experienced military commanders within NATO structures, having served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Development and Preparation at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) near Mons, Belgium. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)