US to send drone squadron and 1,000 troops to Poland
The US intends to transfer additional military forces to Poland, where it already has 4,500 of its troops stationed, announced US President Donald Trump after a meeting with his Polish colleague President Andrzej Duda.
As part of the declaration to expand military cooperation signed by Trump and Duda on Thursday in Warsaw, a contingent of an additional 1,000 US troops will be sent to Poland, as well as a squadron of reconnaissance drones.
A new military airfield will also be built “for training purposes or for unforeseen circumstances”, and a special forces division headquarters will be deployed “to support aerial, ground and maritime” activity, the declaration states.
“Russia is once again showing its unkind, hostile imperial face,” said Duda during a joint press-conference with Trump, and added that Moscow “has always sought to take Polish territory”.
The US deployed troops in Poland as part of the NATO 2016 agreement in response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Russia will not neglect to respond to the new transfer of US troops, promised Vladimir Shamanov, head of Russian parliament’s Defense Committee.
“Of course, as our President Vladimir Putin has said before, we will be compelled to take countermeasures, and we have these in our arsenal,” Shamanov noted.
He remarked that “the world is gradually sliding towards the precarious border of the events of the Caribbean Crisis, because attack-class unmanned aerial vehicles are compatible with intermediate range missiles according to their specifications, and this means that they are capable of carrying nuclear weaponry”.