Poland Wants To Pay US $2 Billion For Its Permanent Military Presence
Poland Wants To Pay US $2 Billion For Its Permanent Military Presence
“This proposal outlines the clear and present need for a permanent U.S. armored division deployed in Poland, Poland’s commitment to provide significant support that may reach $1.5-2 billion by establishing joint military installations and provide for more flexible movement of U.S. forces,” the Polish defense ministry states in the document.
The ministry goes a step further in trying to coax the U.S. into agreeing to the terms, adding it is willing “to share the burden of defense spending, make the decision more cost-effective for the U.S. government and allay any concerns for Congress in uncertain budgetary times.”
Poland has long asked for American support, including troops and a permanent military base, for decades. (RELATED: Polish President Signs ‘Holocaust’ Blame Bill)
Prior to former President Barack Obama’s visit to Poland in 2014, where he announced the U.S. would spend $1 billion boosting its military presence in Eastern Europe, former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski backhandedly urged the U.S. to set up a permanent military presence in the nation.
“For the first time since the Second World War, one European country has taken a province by force from another European country,” Sikorski told The New York Times. “America, we hope, has ways of reassuring us that we haven’t even thought about. There are major bases in Britain, in Spain, in Portugal, in Greece, in Italy. Why not here?”
Poland is, notably, one of the NATO member nations that has agreed to President Donald Trump’s call for members to cough up two percent, or more, of their GDPs to military defense. Poland has done that since 2015. (RELATED: Poland Signs Deal With US To Gain Patriot Missiles)
The proposal comes nearly one month before members of NATO gather in Brussels for a summertime summit. Russia, a NATO partner country, isn’t likely to take the Polish offering to America well, which could complicate Poland’s relationship with other member nations, like Italy and Germany.
Both of the nations have expressed an intent to smooth over relations with Moscow.
Poland is likely fearing Russia’s continued influence and takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea region — a campaign the Kremlin began four years ago during Obama’s administration.
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”Russia, a NATO partner country, isn’t likely to take the Polish offering to America well, which could complicate Poland’s relationship with other member nations, like Italy and Germany.” The Pole’s remember Russian murder of over twenty thousand Polish officers in the Katyn forest, who surrendered as Prisoners of War in October 1939 to the invading Soviet army, and the Nazi invasion setting off World War Two. The invasion violated 1907 Hague convention Article One for declaration of war. The USSR did not so bother. From the CIA.Gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence titled
The Katyn Controversy: Stalin’s Killing Field
Benjamin B. Fischer. On 28 September, the USSR and Nazi Germany, allied since August, partitioned and then dissolved the Polish state. They then began implementing parallel policies of suppressing all resistance and destroying the Polish elite in their respective areas. The NKVD and the Gestapo coordinated their actions on many issues, including prisoner exchanges. At Brest Litovsk, Soviet and German commanders held a joint victory parade before German forces withdrew westward behind a new demarcation line. 1 Just two days after the invasion began on 17 September, the NKVD created a Directorate of Prisoners of War. 2 It took custody of Polish prisoners from the Army and began organizing a network of reception centers and transfer camps and arranging rail transport to the western USSR. Once there, the Poles were placed in “special” (concentration) camps, where, from October to February, they were subjected to lengthy interrogations and constant political agitation. The camps were at Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov, all three located on the grounds of former Orthodox monasteries converted into prisons. The NKVD dispatched one of its rising stars, Maj. Vassili Zarubin, to Kozelsk, where most of the officers were kept, to conduct interviews. Zarubin presented himself to the Poles as a charming, sympathetic, and cultured Soviet official, which led many prisoners into sharing confidences that would cost them their lives. 3 The Poles were encouraged to believe they would be released, but the interviews were in effect a selection process to determine who would live and who would die. On 5 March 1940, Stalin signed their death warrant–an NKVD order condemning 21,857 prisoners to “the supreme penalty: shooting.” They had been condemned as “hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority.” 6 The Killing Field
During April-May 1940, the Polish prisoners were moved from their internment camps and taken to three execution sites. The place most identified with the Soviet atrocity is Katyn Forest, located 12 miles west of Smolensk, Russia. The Katyn Forest massacre was a criminal act of historic proportions and enduring political implications. When Nazi occupation forces in April 1943 announced the discovery of several mass graves, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels hoped that international revulsion over the Soviet atrocity would drive a wedge into the Big Three coalition and buy Germany a breathing space, if not a victory, in its war against Russia. (A headline in the May 1943 Newsweek read: “Poles vs. Reds: Allied Unity Put to Test Over Officer Dead.”) But Goebbels miscalculated. Despite overwhelming evidence of Soviet responsibility, Moscow blamed the Germans, and for the rest of the war Washington and London officially accepted the Soviet countercharge. When the Polish government-in-exile in London demanded an international inquiry, Stalin used this as a pretext to break relations. The Western allies objected but eventually acquiesced. Soon thereafter, the Soviet dictator assembled a group of Polish Communists that returned to Poland with the Red Army in 1944 and formed the nucleus of the postwar government. Stalin’s experience with the Katyn affair may have convinced him that the West, grateful for the Red Army’s contribution to the Allied military effort, would find it hard to confront him over Poland after the war. hose who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and 131 refugees. Also among the dead were 20 university professors; 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots. 7 It was their social status that landed them in front of NKVD execution squads. Most of the victims were reservists who had been mobilized when Germany invaded. In all, the NKVD eliminated almost half the Polish officer corps–part of Stalin’s long-range effort to prevent the resurgence of an independent Poland.
Recent historical research shows that 700-900 of the victims were Polish Jews. 8 Ironically, the Germans knew this, and it complicated Goebbels’ effort to portray the atrocity as a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy”–a mainstay of the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitic propaganda. Two US servicemen, brought from a POW camp in Germany, were at Katyn in 1943, when Berlin held an international news conference there to publicize the atrocity. The ranking officer was Col. John H. Van Vliet, a fourth-generation West Pointer. After returning to Washington in 1945, he wrote a report concluding that the Soviets, not the Germans, were responsible. He gave the report to Maj. Gen. Clayton Bissell, Gen. George Marshall’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence, who deep-sixed it. Years later, Bissell defended his action before Congress, contending that it was not in the US interest to embarrass an ally whose forces were still needed to defeat Japan. In 1944, President Roosevelt assigned Capt. George Earle, his special emissary to the Balkans, to compile information on Katyn. Earle did so, using contacts in Bulgaria and Romania. He too concluded that the Soviet Union was guilty. FDR rejected Earle’s conclusion, saying that he was convinced of Nazi Germany’s responsibility. The report was suppressed. When Earle requested permission to publish his findings, the President gave him a written order to desist. Earle–who had been a Roosevelt family friend–spent the rest of the war in American Samoa. For 50 years, the Soviet Union concealed the truth. The coverup began in April 1943, almost immediately after the Red Army had recaptured Smolensk. The NKVD destroyed a cemetery the Germans had permitted the Polish Red Cross to build and removed other evidence. Katyn was a forbidden topic in postwar Poland. Censors suppressed all references to it. Even mentioning the atrocity meant risking reprisal. While Katyn was erased from Poland’s official history, it could not be erased from historical memory. In 1981, Solidarity erected a memorial with the simple inscription “Katyn, 1940.” Even that was too much. Gorbachev had a chance to address Katyn during a July 1988 state visit to Warsaw, but dodged the issue. In November, the Soviet Government announced plans for a new memorial at Katyn commemorating Polish officers “[who] together with 500 Soviet prisoners . . . were shot by the fascists in 1943 as our army approached Smolensk.” This was not true, and the change of dates was a further obfuscation, but more important was the subliminal message directed to the Poles: Russia and Poland were both victims of German aggression, something neither country should forget. 14 n early 1989, three top Soviet officials sent Gorbachev a memorandum warning him that the issue was becoming “more acute” and that “time is not our ally.” 15 Some form of official admission, even a partial one, would have to be made. At a Kremlin ceremony on 13 October 1990, Gorbachev handed Jaruzelski a folder of documents that left no doubt about Soviet guilt. He did not, however, make a full and complete disclosure. Missing from the folder was the March 1940 NKVD execution order. Gorbachev laid all blame on Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, and his deputy. (This was a safe move, because Beria and his deputy had been branded criminals and summarily shot by Stalin’s successors.) Gorbachev also failed to mention that the actual number of victims was 21,857–more than the usually cited figure of 15,000. By shaving the truth, Gorbachev had shielded the Soviet Government and the Communist Party, making Katyn look like a rogue secret police action rather than an official act of mass murder. “The Katyn Enigma: New Evidence in a 40-Year Riddle” that had appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Studies in Intelligence. It was written by CIA officer and NPIC analyst Robert G. Poirier, who used imagery from Luftwaffe aerial photoreconnaissance during World War II to uncover evidence of the original crime and a Soviet coverup during 1943-1944. 16 The imagery, selected from 17 sorties flown between 1941 and 1944 and spanning a period before, during, and after the German occupation of the Smolensk area, was important evidence. Among other things, it showed that the area where the mass graves were located had not been altered during the German occupation and that the same area displayed physical changes that predated the Germans’ arrival. It also captured the NKVD on film bulldozing some of the Polish graves and removing bodies. Poirier speculated that the corpses had been removed and reburied at another site. 12 May 1991. This was the first public disclosure of the Luftwaffe imagery and its utility for identifying burial sites in the USSR. Ironically, for a second time the German military had provided evidence, albeit unwittingly, of Soviet complicity in the massacre. In 1992, Moscow suddenly “discovered” the original 1940 execution ordered signed by Stalin and five other Politburo members– in Gorbachev’s private archive. 17 Gorbachev almost certainly had read it in 1989, if not earlier. 18 In October 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin presented a copy of the order along with 41 other documents to the new Polish president, former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. In doing so, he made a point of chiding his arch enemy Gorbachev, with whom he was locked in a bitter domestic political battle. During a 1993 visit to Warsaw’s military cemetery, Yeltsin knelt before a Polish priest and kissed the ribbon of a wreath he had placed at the foot of the Katyn cross. 19 In a joint statement with Walesa, he pledged to punish those still alive who had taken part in the massacre and make reparations–a promise that has not been kept. Meanwhile, Soviet and Polish teams were permitted to excavate at Katyn and the other two sites, on a selective basis, where Polish prisoners had been executed. In 1994, a Soviet historian published a book that for the first time called Katyn a “crime against humanity.” 20 Stalin’s secret police had committed crimes against some 11,000 Poles living in western Ukraine and western Belorussia after the USSR had incororated those regions, and murdered more than 3,000 Polish prisoners in panic killings when Germany attacked in June 1941.