A Polish general was dismissed last week by the nation’s defense minister after reportedly misplacing a batch of anti-tank mines that were later found in an Ikea warehouse, according to Polish news outlet Onet.
Maj. Gen. Artur Kępczyński was fired Jan. 9 for reasons that were not specified by Polish military officials, though numerous local reports suggested the missing explosives were — naturally — the catalyst for his dismissal.
In June 2024, a train carrying more than 1,000 tons of explosives was improperly unloaded by Polish troops, the report said, who mistakenly left the anti-tank mines to continue their rail-bound journey around the country until they were eventually offloaded in the furniture behemoth’s warehouse.
Kępczyński, meanwhile, reportedly kept the mishap from his superiors while furnishing subsequent supply reports that featured false numbers.
That approach appeared to have worked — at least until an Ikea warehouse representative telephoned military officials and inquired about “when they would collect their mines,” according to one report.
The Polish defense ministry posted on X confirming the dismissal of Kępczynski, who was reportedly a lead figure in the service’s logistics support element. An investigation into the incident is ongoing, the report said.
Though the story is indeed eccentric, Ikea, which was once exposed for using horse meat in over a dozen countries to craft their delectable Swedish meatballs, is no stranger to outlandish episodes. The furniture store’s cavernous confines, surpassed only by Moria when it comes to mine-hosting capacity, has playing host to all manner of stranger-than-fiction tales.
In 2012, for instance, a Japanese macaque monkey named Darwin escaped his Ontario-based owner’s crate and was later seen galavanting through an Ikea store wearing a sheepskin coat and diaper.
The following year, New Jersey-based couple Rashid Smith and Shirley Stewart were married in the same Ikea where they’d met eight years prior. It’s a Jersey thing.
And who could forget 12-year-old Peng Yijian of China, who in 2014 ran away and hid for six days in a Shanghai Ikea before he was found by local police.
Classic Peng.
Whether Kępczyński will face further punishment remains to be seen, though the sheer humiliation of the ordeal may offer retribution enough.
It is, after all, an incident come to life out of every veteran’s nightmares, those unique post-service cerebral ticks that yield “Here I am deployed to combat, but I’ve forgotten my rifle” terrors.
J.D. Simkins is the executive editor of Military Times and Defense News, and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War.
