Russia angry as Poland gets Patriots
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At a ceremony today Poland officially unveiled a battery of US Patriot surface-to-air missiles that will be stationed at a military base near its border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The move has met with a stony response from Moscow.
A number of dignitaries, including the Polish defence minister and the US ambassador, gathered in the northern town of Morag today to welcome the US Patriot missile battery and the approximately 150 American troops accompanying it to Poland.
The US 5th Battalion arrived from Germany at the weekend. Since then troops have been unloading and assembling the Patriots, the stationing of which in Poland was initially agreed between Warsaw and Washington during the previous Bush administration. The details were finalised in February this year.
The missiles are to be rotated in and out of the country until 2012 and Polish troops trained to operate them.
Russian protest
The missile battery, just 60 kilometres from the Kaliningrad border, has brought strong condemnation from Moscow.
According to Russian Foreign Ministry sources, cited by today’s media, the placement of the American missile battery in Morąg, “will not help strengthen the region’s general security or the development of mutual trust and predictability in the region”.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry also repeated that it finds it difficult to understand the reasoning behind the cooperation between the United States and Poland on this issue.
“We regret to say that our questions towards the Polish and American sides have been left unanswered. As have our arguments for moving the region of the temporary placement of the battery farther away from the Russian border,” stress the sources in the information department at the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Both Poland and the US have repeatedly stressed that the missiles are for defensive purposes only and pose no threat to Russia.
