Poland to host US defence shield

The US president and his Polish counterpart have said parts of a missile defence system will be built in Poland despite Moscow’s objections.

George Bush and Lech Kaczynski, meeting at the White House, said that the system was not aimed at Russia but at smaller countries such as Iran or North Korea that US officials say pose a missile threat.

Bush said on Tuesday the deployment “would provide a security for Europe from single- or dual-launch regimes that may emanate from parts of the world where leaders don’t particularly care for our way of life and/or are in the process of trying to develop serious weapons of mass destruction”.

“There’s no better symbol of our desire to work for peace and security than working on a missile defence system.”

Defence instrument

Kaczynski said: “So it is really a defence instrument, missile defence instrument. And so I do hope that all this project, the whole project will be completed successfully.”

The Russian president has never been mollified by that argument and the Kremlin announced on Saturday that Vladimir Putin, the president, had signed a decree suspending Moscow’s participation in a post-Cold War security treaty.

In Poland, a survey by a publicly funded institute in Warsaw, said that 55 per cent of Poles oppose putting the base on Polish territory - a drop from the previous month, when 60 per cent were opposed.

Contradictions

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the Polish prime minister and the president’s twin brother, said on Tuesday that the shield offered Poland a way to strengthen its alliance with the US and guarantee its security against a resurgent Russia, thus contradicting what Bush and Lech had said a day earlier.

“The point … is the status of Poland and the future of our country - whether we end up back again in the place we were for many years or whether we don’t end up there,” he said, referring to the Cold War era, when Poland was controlled by the Soviet Union.

In recent months, Moscow suggested it would target missiles at Europe if the US went ahead with the proposal for the defence system.

Agencies

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