A U.S. defense official announced Friday that the United States next year intends to field ground-to-air Patriot missiles in Poland, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Sept. 29).
"We presented some detailed information on how the rotations of our Patriot batteries would be conducted over the next few years under the August 2008 agreement [with Poland]," Assistant Defense Secretary Alexander Vershbow said after a meeting in Warsaw with Polish Deputy Defense Ministry Stanislaw Komorowski in Warsaw.
The Polish government had sought the Patriot deployment as part of its agreement with the Bush administration for Poland to house 10 long-range missile interceptors. The Obama administration recently scrapped that plan in favor of a missile shield that would focus on threats from short- and medium-range missiles.
Komorowski said the Patriot missile battery "will be armed and possess elements permitting it to be integrated with the Polish defense system."
Washington's plans for the new missile shield and how it might involve Poland were also discussed, AFP reported.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that Poland and the Czech Republic in 2015 might also become home to Standard Missile 3 systems, which are to be the backbone of the new missile shield plan. The Czech Republic previously had been tagged to host a U.S. radar system.
"We are very interested in the possibility that Poland would be the host country for one of the two land-based SM-3 missile sites that are envisaged under the four-staged plan that President [Barack] Obama has laid out," Vershbow said (Agence-France Presse I/Google News, Oct. 16).
The Obama administration hopes the new missile defense deal with Warsaw will be set during Vice President Joseph Biden's trip to Poland this week, United Press International reported (United Press International, Oct. 16).
Meanwhile, Russia bristled Thursday at reports that the United States was considering working with Ukraine and other non-NATO countries in the creation of a missile defense shield, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Oct. 14).
"We are experiencing the concerns that emerge when major questions of strategic stability should be considered in a partner-like manner," said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, according to Russian news organizations.
Ryabkov's comments came after he was asked his thoughts on Russian media reports that the United States was considering utilizing Ukrainian radar facilities in its missile defenses (Associated Press/Google News, Oct. 15).
"We feel concerned," Ryabkov said of the matter, Reuters reported.
"To say we are encouraged about the information we are getting about contacts on this subject would be, to put it mildly, an exaggeration," he added, according to ITAR-Tass.
Washington has already reached out to Kiev on the radar plan, said Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oleh Shamshur.
"This issue is in the process of working discussions," Shamshur said, according to Interfax. "It is still at a beginning stage."
Shamshur implied that Russia passed on its own chance of using Ukrainian radar.
"We are also talking about the question of using our defense radars across Ukraine's territory, which, as you all know, Russia has declined to use," he said (Conor Sweeney, Reuters/Washington Post, Oct. 15).
Elsewhere, the Collective Security Treaty Organization announced Wednesday that the militaries of its member states were largely "unlikely" to take part in the creation of a proposed European missile shield, Interfax reported.
"It's only the resources of the Russian Federation, which are truly large, that will be used if anything," CSTO General Secretary Nikolai Bordyuzha told Russia's Vesti 24 news channel.
The treaty organization's seven member nations are Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Russia's military has "a lot that's interesting from the point of view of creating, together with other European states and the U.S., a system that would make it possible to evade a missile attack," Bordyuzha said (Interfax, Oct. 15).
Also on Friday, a German company announced plans to create a five-satellite system that could be sent into space to detect medium-range missiles that threaten Europe, AFP reported. That could help overcome Russia's resistance to such an effort, the firm asserted.
"We are studying a concept of an alternative system which could protect Europe without the global political impact" of the proposed U.S. missile shield, said Fritz Merkle, a board member with OHB. "It could be one element in an antimissile defense system."
"The political correctness of the system is that it would be designed for medium latitudes: that means all the long-range Russian missiles are not in the detection range," he said.
Merkle said the cost of such a system would be around $744 million (Agence France-Presse II/Spacewar.com, Oct. 16).