She said the Baltic nations and Poland “expressed gratitude to Germany and other states” at the summit, where a decision was reached to deploy a four-battalion rotational force, spearheaded by Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States.
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President Barack Obama turns from the podium after making a statement on the fatal police shootings of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota after arriving in Warsaw, Poland, Friday, July 8, 2016.
The Warsaw summit is set to confirm that North Atlantic Treaty Organisation will deploy four worldwide battalions, one of them American, on a rotating basis to Poland and the three Baltic countries, which fear potential Russian aggression following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Obama said 1,000 United States troops would be stationed in Poland and Britain said it would deploy 650 troops, a lot of them in Estonia.
“It’s an open-ended commitment and will last as long as necessary”, he said.
In a sign of the high stakes, Washington’s envoy to NATO, Douglas Lute, warned last month that if Russian Federation were to activate its long-range, networked air defences in Kaliningrad, that could be an act of war. Eighteen presidents including Barack Obama, 21 prime ministers, alongside 39 defence and 41 foreign ministers were attending the two-day event, attended by delegations from 54 countries.
Speaking after meeting Duda, Obama said Poland had taken some steps to address USA and European concerns but more should be done. Following bilateral talks, Duda thanked Obama, saying Poles “are grateful for the good will, for understanding that security is where the world’s strongest army is, and that army is the U.S. Army”.
Standing alongside European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, Obama says governments must move more quickly to deliver economic priorities to their people.
In an op-ed published in the Financial Times on Friday, Obama says the US and European nation “must summon the political will, and make concrete commitments” to affirm European cooperation.
The Warsaw Pact members were NATO’s principal adversary for decades – until agreed to dissolve their military and political partnership in 1991, after Soviet power collapsed across Eastern Europe. It follows a raft of other decisions taken during the last 22 months to increase NATO’s ability to face Russian Federation and other new security challenges, including tripling the size of the alliance Response Force to 40,000 and formation of a highly nimble Spearhead Force that can start to move within days.
US President Barack Obama also said that a US armoured brigade would arrive in Europe at the beginning of next year, with its headquarters to be located in Poland.
“Russia is not looking [for an enemy] but it actually sees it happening”, Peskov told reporters in Moscow. “When NATO soldiers march along our border and NATO jets fly by, it’s not us who is moving closer to the NATO borders”.
Friday evening, President Obama and the other NATO leaders dined at Poland’s Presidential Palace, the site where communist leaders signed their 1955 treaty. The US deputy secretary of defence, Robert Work, said at the time that the buildup was a response to more Russian activity around the Baltics – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – where tensions have been rising. “And they make clear that an attack on one ally would be considered an attack on the whole alliance”, he stressed.
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Nato allies promised the United States on Saturday they will stump up around US$1 billion (S$1.4 billion) a year over the next three years to help fund the Afghan military, Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Saturday.
