Poland and U.S. sign shield deal

POLAND: The United States and Poland signed a deal on Wednesday to station parts of a U.S. missile defence shield on Polish soil, drawing a sharp response from Moscow.

The deal is seen as certain to aggravate tensions between Russia and the West already strained by Moscow’s military intervention in Georgia. The 10 interceptor rockets in Poland, along with a radar complex in the Czech Republic, will form the European part of a global system Washington says will be able to shoot down missiles from “rogue” states or groups such as al Qaeda.

“This is an agreement that will establish a missile defence site here in Poland that will help us to deal with ... long range missiles ... from countries like Iran or North Korea,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who signed the agreement with Poland’s Radoslaw Sikorski, told reporters.

Despite U.S. assurances to the contrary, Russia sees the ballistic missile shield as a threat to its own security and some Russian politicians and generals have said Poland must be prepared for a preventive attack on the site in the future. Rice said she understood why NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer had denounced such remarks as “pathetic rhetoric.”

The Foreign Ministry in Moscow said later: “Russia in this case will have to react and not only through diplomatic protests.”

The shield was “one of the instruments in an extremely dangerous bundle of American military projects involving the one-sided development of a global missile shield system”.

A ministry statement said it would provide no protection against “imaginary Iranian danger”. The interceptors will be placed at the ex-Warsaw Pact base of Redzikowo in northern Poland, 1,360 km (800 miles) from Moscow and 300 km from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea coast.

Russia says Washington and Warsaw rushed through the deal as a response to its military action in Georgia.

Warsaw, Thursday, Reuters