OLSZYNA: US troops and tanks began streaming into Poland on Thursday as part of one of the largest deployments of US forces in Europe since the Cold War, an operation that Russia angrily branded a “threat.”
The Atlantic Resolve mission will see more than 3,000 American soldiers and heavy equipment deployed in Poland and nearby NATO partners Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary on a rotational basis.
The outgoing US administration of President Barack Obama ordered the deployment of an armored brigade to the region after 2014 to reassure eastern allies after Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
The operation has sparked immediate anger from Russia, with the Kremlin describing it as a “threat” on its “doorstep.”
“This is unprecedented for Poland,” Michal Baranowski, Warsaw office director of the German Marshall Fund of the US think-tank, told AFP.
“We have not had this level of a rotational presence since the Cold War.” Baranowski said the arrival of the US troops, along with NATO’s coming deployment of four multi-national battalion groups in Poland and the three Baltic states, “changes the security calculus on the alliance’s eastern flank” by creating a much-boosted deterrent.
“These forces will have a ‘trip wire’ function — no longer will it be possible for Russia to have a quick victory for example in the Baltic states on the cheap,” Baranowski said.
“It will not be able to have just a regional conflict because the NATO allies will automatically be affected — and that’s a very big change,” he added.
But the operation comes a week ahead of the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump, who has suggested his Republican administration will seek to ease tensions with the Kremlin.
According to Stanislaw Koziej, a retired Polish brigadier general who served as national security chief from 2010-15, the arrival of the US brigade has “somewhat calmed concerns about the direction the US will go after the arrival of the new president.”
“If he really wanted to, the president-elect (Trump) could comment on the deployment, but since he hasn’t, that’s calmed the air,” Koziej said.
US troops entered Poland at the Olszyna border crossing with Germany on Thursday and headed to the brigade’s headquarters in the nearby Polish town of Zagan.
Heavy equipment, including 87 Abrams tanks and over 500 personnel carriers including military-equipped Humvees were to follow.
“This operation threatens our interests and our security,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday.
“This is even more pronounced when a third party (the US) reinforces its military presence on our doorstep in Europe.”
Russian deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Mechkov described the deployment as a “factor destabilising European security.”
But Baranowski disagreed. “No matter how we look at it — even with full deployment of forces that was agreed at the (2016) NATO summit plus this presence of the armored brigade combat team — Russia has overwhelming domination when it comes to force ratio” in the region, he said.
“Looking at how many forces they (Russia) have versus how many forces NATO has in the region, we’re talking about a discrepancy of 10 to 15 times as many.”
Last summer, NATO leaders also endorsed plans to rotate troops into Poland and the three Baltic states to reassure them they would not be left in the lurch if Russia was tempted to repeat its 2014 Ukraine intervention.
A separate US-led battalion working within the NATO framework will be stationed near Poland’s northeast border with Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave.
Moscow has stepped up its presence in the Baltic Sea area over the last two years.
Its jets regularly violate the airspace of smaller ex-Soviet NATO allies like Estonia and in April they even buzzed a US naval destroyer.
Late last year, Poland criticized Moscow’s deployment of nuclear-capable Iskander missiles into its Kaliningrad outpost, which borders NATO members Poland and Lithuania.
US troops in Poland draw Russian ire
US troops in Poland draw Russian ire
Rubio defends US ouster of Venezuela’s Maduro to Caribbean leaders unsettled by Trump policies
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts and Nevis: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday defended the Trump administration’s military operation to capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, telling Caribbean leaders, many of whom objected to that move, that the country and the region were better off as a result.
Speaking to leaders from the 15-member Caribbean Community bloc at a summit in the country of St. Kitts and Nevis, Rubio brushed aside concerns about the legality of Maduro’s capture last month that have been raised among Venezuela’s island-state neighbors and others.
“Irrespective of how some of you may have individually felt about our operations and our policy toward Venezuela, I will tell you this, and I will tell you this without any apology or without any apprehension: Venezuela is better off today than it was eight weeks ago,” Rubio told the leaders in a closed-door meeting, according to a transcript of his remarks later distributed by the US State Department.
Rubio said that since Maduro’s ouster and the effective takeover of Venezuela’s oil sector by the United States, the interim authorities in the South American country have made “substantial” progress in improving conditions by doing “things that eight or nine weeks ago would have been unimaginable.”
The Caribbean leaders have gathered to debate pressing issues in a region that President Donald Trump has targeted for a 21st-century incarnation of the Monroe Doctrine meant to ensure Washington’s dominance in the Western Hemisphere. The Republican administration has declared a focus closer to home even as Washington increasingly has been preoccupied by the possibility of a US military attack on Iran.
Rubio downplays antagonism in US regional push
In his remarks to the group, America’s top diplomat tried to play down any antagonistic intent in what Trump has referred to as the “Donroe Doctrine.” Rubio said the administration wants to strengthen ties with the region in the wake of the Venezuela operation and ensure that issues such as crime and economic opportunities are jointly addressed.
“I am very happy to be in an administration that’s giving priority to the Western Hemisphere after largely being ignored for a very long time,” Rubio said. “We share common opportunities, and we share some common challenges. And that’s what we hope to confront.”
He said transnational criminal organizations pose the biggest threat to the Caribbean while recognizing that many are buying weapons from the United States, a problem he said authorities are tackling.
Rubio also said the US and the Caribbean can work together on economic advancement and energy issues, especially because many leaders at the four-day summit have energy resources they seek to explore. “We want to be your partner in that regard,” he said.
Rubio said the US recognizes the need for fair, democratic elections in Venezuela, which lies just miles away from Trinidad and Tobago at the closest point.
“We do believe that a prosperous, free Venezuela who’s governed by a legitimate government who has the interests of their people in mind could also be an extraordinary partner and asset to many of the countries represented here today in terms of energy needs and the like, and also one less source of instability in the region,” he said.
Rubio added: “We view our security, our prosperity, our stability to be intricately tied to yours.”
Trump plays up Maduro’s ouster
Trump, in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, called the operation that spirited Maduro out of Venezuela to face drug trafficking charges in New York “an absolutely colossal victory for the security of the United States.”
The US had built up the largest military presence in the Caribbean Sea in generations before the Jan. 3 raid. That has now been exceeded by the surge of American warships and aircraft to the Middle East as the administration pressures Iran to make a deal over its nuclear program.
In the Caribbean, Trump has stepped up aggressive tactics to combat alleged drug smuggling with a series of strikes on boats that have killed over 150 people and he has tightened pressure on Cuba. Regional leaders have complained about administration demands for nations to accept third-country deportees from the US and to chill relations with China.
One regional leader who has backed the US escalation is Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, whom Rubio thanked for her “public support for US military operations in the South Caribbean Sea,” the State Department said.
Persad-Bissessar told reporters that her conversation with Rubio focused on “Haiti; we talked about Cuba of course; we talked about engagements with Venezuela and the way forward.”
She was asked if she considered the latest US military strikes in Caribbean waters as extrajudicial killings: “I don’t think they are, and if they are, we will find out, but our legal advice is they are not.”
Rubio had other one-on-one meetings with heads of government, including from St. Kitts and Nevis, Haiti, Jamaica and Guyana.
Caribbean leaders point to shifting global order
Trump said during the State of the Union that his administration is “restoring American security and dominance in the Western Hemisphere, acting to secure our national interests and defend our country from violence, drugs, terrorism and foreign interference.”
Terrance Drew, prime minister of St. Kitts and Nevis and chair of the Caribbean Community bloc, said the region “stands at a decisive hour” and that “the global order is shifting.”
Drew and other leaders said Cuba’s humanitarian situation must be addressed.
“It must be clear that a prolonged crisis in Cuba will not remain confined to Cuba,” Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness warned. “It will affect migration, security and economic stability across the Caribbean basin.”
The US Treasury Department on Wednesday slightly eased restrictions on the sale of Venezuelan oil to Cuba, which instituted austere fuel-saving measures in the weeks after the US raid in Venezuela.
That move came hours before Cuba’s government announced that its soldiers killed four people aboard a speedboat registered in Florida that had opened fire on officers in Cuban waters.
