Polish anti-communist icon Lech Walesa said Poland should procure nuclear weapons as a safeguard against Russia, which it blames for stoking the crisis in neighboring Ukraine.

"Poland needs to stand up to Russia," the Nobel Peace laureate, who spearheaded Poland's democracy movement and became its first post-communist president, said in an interview published Wednesday.

Some 170 Polish miners on Wednesday blocked train tracks near the northern border with Russia's Kaliningrad province to stop a train carrying cheaper Russian coal, the border guard service said.

"An approaching train has been stopped before getting to the spot where the miners are," a spokeswoman for the service, Agnieszka Golias, told Agence France Presse.

Poland kicks off major military exercises involving eight NATO partners on Wednesday amid the West's worst standoff with Russia since the end of the Cold War sparked by differences over the Ukraine crisis.

Organized every two years since 2006, this year's Anaconda maneuvers involve 12,500 soldiers, with 750 from NATO members the U.S. and Britain among others, the Polish defense ministry said, adding the event "has become a permanent training element of the North Atlantic alliance".

Poland's president on Monday swore in the government of incoming Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz, calling on her to prepare the country for a debate on eurozone membership. 

Kopacz took over this month as head of government from Donald Tusk, who resigned after he was tapped to become the next European Council chief in December. 

Poland will not send arms or otherwise get involved in the bloody conflict in neighboring Ukraine, its prime minister-designate Ewa Kopacz said Friday.

"We shouldn't be an active participant in this armed conflict," Kopacz told reporters, while adding that Poland would adhere to all joint EU initiatives concerning Ukraine.

Scotland may historically have been a nation of emigration but a wave of recent Polish immigrants will vote in Thursday's independence referendum, with lessons from their home countries shaping their decision.

As in much of the rest of Britain, Poles make up the biggest group of immigrants in Scotland. Of the seven percent of people in Scotland born abroad, 15 percent or 55,000 are from Poland.

Polish villagers got a surprise when half a dozen U.S. military helicopters emerged from heavy fog to make an emergency landing in a rapeseed field.

Onlookers responded "first with worry and bewilderment, then curiosity," Stanislaw Raginiak from the office of the rural county of Gruta said Wednesday.

Poland on Tuesday temporarily closed its embassy in Baghdad over security concerns in Iraq, which has been plagued by militant Islamic State jihadists.

"Following the worsening of the security situation in Iraq, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has decided to temporarily suspend the activities of the Polish embassy in Baghdad as of September 9," the ministry said in a statement.

Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned on Monday that the war in eastern Ukraine risks spreading if NATO does not toughen its stance quickly.

Tusk, tipped as the European Union's next president, claimed that "our Western community is threatened by war, not just in eastern Ukraine", as Poles marked 75 years since the outbreak of World War II.

Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk is a pro-European free marketeer who has earned the reputation of being an unflappable leader able to turn even the most difficult situations to his advantage.

With political roots in Poland's anti-communist Solidarity trade union, the football-mad historian named on Saturday as the EU's next president started out as an underground journalist.