NATO chief to hold talks with Polish president
PR dla Zagranicy
Paweł Kononczuk
07.03.2019 07:40
NATO’s secretary general was to hold talks with President Andrzej Duda during a two-day visit to Poland starting on Thursday.
Andrzej Duda (centre) meets troops at a training ground in Orzysz, north-east Poland, on Wednesday. Photo: PAP/Tomasz Waszczuk
The meeting comes amid efforts by Warsaw to secure a boosted US military presence on NATO’s eastern flank and as Poland marks the 20th anniversary of joining the Western military alliance.
The Polish president’s chief of staff, Krzysztof Szczerski, said that Duda and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg would discuss the future of the alliance, including a beefed-up presence on its eastern borders.
Szczerski said Stoltenberg’s visit would also be an opportunity to sum up the two decades of Poland’s membership of NATO.
Poland already hosts American troops on a rotating basis as part of the alliance, and the Polish section of a US missile defence shield over Europe is being built by the Americans at Redzikowo in the north of the country.
Amid fears of Russian aggression following Moscow's annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014, NATO decided at a Warsaw summit in July 2016 to deploy four rotating multinational battalions to Poland and the Baltic states.
Defence Minister Mariusz Błaszczak said last month he had no doubts that the United States would step up its military presence in Poland.
(pk)
Source: PAP