- Putin remains adamant, NATO welcomes US deployments
The United States President, Joe Biden will deploy more than 3,000 US troops in Germany, Poland and Romania, as Russia continues to build up its forces around Ukraine, and after talks between Washington and Moscow failed to ease tensions.
According to reports, the US is sending 1,700 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to Poland, a headquarters unit of about 300 from the 18th Airborne Corps will move to Germany and a 1,000-strong armoured unit is being transferred from Germany to Romania.
“This force is designed to deter aggression and enhance our defensive capabilities in frontline allied states. We expect them to move in coming days,” said John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesperson.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, “continues to add forces, combined arms, offensive capabilities, even over just the last 24 hours he continues to add in western Russia and Belarus, and in the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic”, Kirby added.
“He has shown no signs of being interested or willing to de-escalate the tensions”, the Pentagon spokesperson said, adding that the deployments were separate from the 8,500 troops in the US that were put on heightened alert to be ready to deploy at short notice.
Kirby, who disclosed that the forces are mostly earmarked to be part of a NATO Response Force (NRF) intended to bolster the alliance’s eastern flank in the face of a potential Russian attack on Ukraine, said the troops being deployed in the coming days were being sent under bilateral agreements with the host countries.
NATO has so far not taken the decision to activate the NRF, which would require the agreement of its 30 member states, including Hungary, whose Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, visited Moscow on Tuesday to offer support for Putin and said sanctions on Russia were “doomed to failure”.
European diplomats, however, said that German caution in responding to the crisis was more an obstacle to rapid activation of the NRF than Hungarian obstructionism.
“Trying to get this done through NATO could take weeks and would only expose all the internal differences,” one diplomat said.
The vanguard of the NRF has been under French command since January and its core is a 3,500-strong Franco-German brigade. The NATO Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, welcomed the US deployments and said the alliance could take similar steps to bolster its eastern flank.
“We have increased the readiness of the NATO Response Force, and we are considering the deployment of additional battlegroups to the south-eastern part of the alliance,” Stoltenberg said. “Our deployments are defensive and proportional, and send the clear message that Nato will do whatever is necessary to protect and defend all allies.”
Biden and Stoltenberg have both made clear that no NATO combat troops would be going into Ukraine, though there are a small number of military advisers there. And on Wednesday, the White House spokesperson, Jen Psaki, said the administration would no longer use the word “imminent” with respect to the threat of Russian military action, saying it had sent an “unintended message”.
The Ukrainian government had complained about the urgency of US rhetoric, saying it was having damaging effects. The decision to deploy US troops follows a flurry of diplomacy that has so far failed to deliver any progress in defusing the crisis.
On Wednesday, the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, warned Putin in a phone call that any further incursion into Ukraine would be “a tragic miscalculation”, according to Downing Street.
The Kremlin account of the call said that Putin had complained his demand for security guarantees had not been met and accused the Kyiv government of “the chronic sabotage” of the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015, which were designed to reach a political settlement in the east of Ukraine, including greater autonomy. – The Guardian
