President: NATO decisions should make attack not worthwhile
The most important tasks of July's NATO summit in Warsaw include bringing Alliance forces into Central and Eastern Europe, Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Wednesday.
President Duda was attending a meeting of national security advisers to the presidents of nine countries from NATO's eastern flank who came to Warsaw to discuss their official position for the alliance's July summit.
The summit should have three main goals, according to Andrzej Duda: it has to comprehensively cover security issues in the east and the south, it should look to the future anticipating possible threats, and it should end in concrete decisions.
"To me, above all this means the necessity to strengthen NATO's present in Central and Eastern Europe", the Polish president underlined, adding that NATO needed to show it was going to defend the order established after World War II and the inviolable borders drawn at that time and then during the transformations in Europe in 1989-1991.
"We need a strengthened NATO military presence in our part of Europe, to show that it is not worth confronting or attacking NATO countries, that any military operations aggressive towards NATO member countries will meet with a firm and efficient response from all the member states", president Duda said.
"The question is to what degree we would manage to strengthen this presence," the president continued. "If a permanent rotational presence instead of permanent bases is to be better for the alliance's modern development, then it could be rotational," Andrzej Duda added.
It is very important for Poland to have bases with NATO infrastructure, namely weapons, according to President Duda, who underlined that these should be defensive weapons which would guarantee security and could also be used for military exercises by NATO and Polish troops.
Andrzej Duda pointed out that Russia was very active militarily "in a way that is hard to call peaceful", both in this part of Europe and in Syria. "If someone today uses military forces to threaten free European countries, there is no doubt that they are acting, in a sense, towards restoring a state of cold war", the Polish president said.
"Today the proper peaceful response is strengthening our defence potential. I think this is the only road to truly calming down the situation in our part of Europe", he continued.
The meeting in Warsaw brought together presidential security advisers and national security council secretaries from the four Visegrad Group countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia), three Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) as well as Bulgaria and Romania.
Source: PAP