(Newswire.net— June 25, 2020) — The US President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he would reduce the number of soldiers in Germany to 25,000 from the current 34,500, Russia Today reports.
According to the current plan, at least part of those troops from Germany are expected to be transferred to Poland.
Last year, the American president told his Polish colleague at a meeting held in the Oval Office that he was considering moving some troops from Germany to Poland.
He also complained that Germany was not fulfilling its obligations in the field of defense in NATO, while he praised Poland for doing its part.
Polish right-wing president Andrzej Duda is trying to attract a larger number of American soldiers, hinting that Poland will allocate more than two billion dollars for a permanent American base in the country.
Germany is one of the few NATO members that has failed to achieve the goal set by the member countries in 2014, in order to allocate at least two percent of GDP for defense by 2024.
According to Russia Today, the Polish president agreed to host US troops at Poland’s expense. Warsaw “will be paying for the sending of some additional troops, we’ll probably be sending them from Germany to Poland,” Trump said on Wednesday.
Trump slowly decreased the amount of US troops in Germany, where the US had its military presence since WWII. Some troops would remain in the EU, but some would get sent back home.
“Some will be coming home and some will be going to other places, but Poland would be one of those places, other places in Europe,” the US president added.
His comments came after Duda told reporters he had asked the US not to remove troops from Europe at all, arguing that their presence was needed to guarantee security for Poland and other nations against the threat of “Russian aggression.”
Donald Trump and Polish president Duda announced moving 1000 troops from Germany to Poland, which worried the Russian Federation. Moscow has previously warned that any increased Nato presence in Poland could prompt it to increase its own footprint in neighboring Belarus, a Russian military ally, Financial Times reported.
The move is a “severe blow” to a 1997 deal on a separation zone between NATO and the Russian Federation which restricted pilling NATO troops in Eastern European countries, Russia’s foreign ministry said.