Poland will move troops toward its eastern borders in a historic realignment of a military structure built in the Cold War, the country’s Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak told The Associated Press on Monday.
“The geopolitical situation has changed. We have the biggest crisis of security since the Cold War and we must draw conclusions from that,” Mr Siemoniak said.
According to him at least three military bases in the east will see their populations increase from the current 30 percent of capacity to almost 90 percent by 2017, and that more military hardware will be moved to those bases as well.
It was not some ‘nervous or radical move’, he stressed, but because of the ‘situation of threat’ those units in the east of Poland should be more efficient, the Minister added.
Although Poland joined NATO in 1999, most of its 120,000-member army is based along the country’s western border, AP noted.
Poland borders on Belarus, Ukraine in the east, on Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast in the north, on Lithuanian in the north and north-east.
www.belsat.eu/en, via Monika Ścisłowska, AP, The Washington Post
