(C) Common Dreams
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On the Edge of a Polish Forest, Where Some of Putin’s Darkest Fears Lurk [1]
['Andrew Higgins']
Date: 2022-02-16
“The current crisis is really much broader than Ukraine,” Mr. Graham said. “Ukraine is a leverage point but it is more about Poland, Romania and the Baltics. The Russians think it is time to revise the post-Cold War settlement in Europe in their favor.”
In a meeting with Mr. Putin on Monday, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, emphasized that Russia wanted to see “radical changes in the sphere of European security,” far-reaching changes that go beyond just Ukraine to include a pullback of NATO troops now in Eastern Europe, limits on the deployment of offensive weaponry and restrictions on intermediate range missiles.
Tomasz Smura, director of research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, a Warsaw research group, said, “This is a huge issue for Russia.”
But shutting down the Redzikowo site, as Moscow wants, he added, is a “red line” that the United States and Poland will not cross, though NATO, in response to a list of demands made by Moscow in December, recently offered discussion of an unspecified “transparency mechanism” in the hope of calming Russian concerns over the Polish and Romanian sites.
But Moscow wants much more than that.
Missile defense has long been viewed by Russia as a dangerous American attempt to degrade the main guarantor of its great power status — a vast nuclear arsenal. The possibility that the United States could shoot down Russian ballistic missiles undermines the deterrent doctrine of mutually assured destruction, which posits that neither of the two biggest nuclear powers would ever risk a nuclear war because it would mean both get annihilated.
During the Cold War, Russia and the United States both worked on developing antimissile defenses, but agreed in 1972 to abandon their rocket shield programs so as to preserve mutual vulnerability and, they hoped, peace.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/16/world/europe/poland-missile-base-russia-ukraine.html
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