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| More US troops arrive in Poland - they are told that their mission is to stop Russia's takeover of Eastern Europe |
Washington
is upping the ante on Moscow. The
message appears to be ‘surrender to western capital or we will continue to
militarily encircle your nation’. A new
and deadly arms race that could easily lead to a shooting war is underway with
the US leading the pack.
The US has
chosen Poland as the perfect location to sharpen the tip of the Pentagon’s
spear.
The US
already has roughly 4,000 troops in Poland. Warsaw has signed an agreement with Washington that provides for setting up storage of Pentagon heavy military
equipment in its territory. The Polish
side provides the land and the US-NATO are supplying the military hardware that
is being deposited at an air base in Laska, the ground troops training center
in Drawsko Pomorskie, as well as military complexes in Skwierzyna, Ciechanów
and Choszczno.
U.S.
officials have also announced plans to place heavy military equipment in
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, and possibly Hungary, Ukraine and Georgia.
A recent report indicates the US intends to remove 9,500 troops from Germany in the months
ahead, with at least 1,000 of the personnel going to Poland. The right-wing Polish government signed an
agreement last year with Washington for a modest troop boost and has offered to
pay for more infrastructure to host American troops – once offering $2 billion
to help pay for a big permanent US base inside their nation.
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| American F-16 war planes land at Krzesiny air base in Poland |
Some NATO members
see these actions as unnecessarily provocative. Moscow has repeatedly objected to
this escalation in Eastern Europe saying that NATO is an aggressor and threatens
Russian sovereignty.
US-NATO
respond that increasing the logistics and transportation capabilities in
Eastern Europe allows the alliance (always looking for enemies in order to
justify its existence) to increase the speed of movement of NATO forces toward Russia.
The National
Guard has partnership programs with virtually all Eastern European nations. The
National Guard rotates their US-based troops in and out of these countries
allowing the Pentagon to claim that ‘permanent’ troop levels in the region are
small.
The US agenda
already includes a rotational Army armored brigade, a US-led multinational NATO
battle group positioned near the Russian territory of Kaliningrad and an
Air Force detachment at Lask. The American Navy also has a contingent of
sailors in the northern Polish town of Redzikowo, where work continues on a
missile ‘defense’ site that integrates with systems in Romania and at sea on
Aegis destroyers.
Outside
Powidz, one of the largest airfields in Europe, a swath of forest has been
cleared to make way for a NATO-funded $260 million storage site for tanks and
other US combat vehicles.
A munitions
bunker and rail-head improvements are also in the works, said Maj. Ian Hepburn,
executive officer for the Maine National Guard’s 286th Combat Sustainment
Support Battalion, part of the task force at Powidz.
The US anti-missile
site close to Poland’s northern Baltic Sea coast, when complete this year, will be part of a system that stretches
from Greenland to the Azores. The Missile Defense Agency, a unit of the Pentagon,
is overseeing installation of the Lockheed Martin built ground-based ‘Aegis
Ashore’ ballistic missile system. Included in this 'Aegis Ashore' program, the US switched on
a similar $800 million site in Romania in May 2016.
From the
Romanian and Polish ‘Aegis Ashore’ missile launch facilities the US could
either launch Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) interceptors (to pick off Russia’s
retaliatory response after a Pentagon first-strike attack) or nuclear-capable
cruise missiles that could hit Moscow in 10 minutes time.
Mateusz
Piskorski, head of the Polish party Zmiana claims that the US-Poland intergovernmental
agreement on placement of US bases for heavy military equipment in Poland is a
part of the US provocative strategy in the region.
"It is
a part of the new aggressive confrontational policy of the United States in
Central and Eastern Europe, the policy which is aimed at containing theoretical
‘Russian threat’ for these countries and which responds to the requests of the
political elites of these countries which ask US authorities to place new
military bases and infrastructure in the region," Piskorski said.
"The
agreement between the United States and Poland is one of several similar
agreements which have been signed lately between the US and different Central
and Eastern European countries, for instance, the same goes for the Baltic
countries which will have the US military bases there," Piskorski added.
"One
must remember about the agreements between Russia and NATO made in 1997….which guarantee
that no permanent military presence of US will be allowed on the territory of
new member states of NATO, which means on the territory of the Eastern European
countries. So this is a direct violation of international law, of the agreement
of 1997," Piskorski said.
Parts reprinted from Stars &
Stripes and Sputnik
Bruce
