Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius said the country would welcome US troops in Poland after Washington said it plans to scale down its military presence in Germany.
A senior US official told Reuters on Monday that Washington will pull out 9,500 troops from the 34,500 currently deployed in Germany. In response, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said he hoped some of them would be redeployed to Poland.
“We would welcome [the move] without a doubt,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius told LRT English on Monday.
Lithuania “particularly appreciated deployments in Poland,” which is “a single region [with the Baltic states] in the context of NATO”, said the minister.
Lithuania and Poland have recently signalled closer military cooperation and have agreed to coordinate joint defence of the so-called Suwalki Gap. The short stretch of land connects the Baltic states with Poland, and is flanked by the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus.
Meanwhile, withdrawing troops from Germany “is a colossal mistake”, Ben Hodges, a retired US general and analyst at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank, told Politico. “The Kremlin has done nothing to deserve a gift like this.”
However, Lithuania’s foreign minister stressed it’s important not to “dramatise” the US move, as American presence has grown in the region in recent years.
An armoured US battalion was recently stationed in Lithuania for six months as part of Atlantic Resolve, an operation aimed at deterring potential aggression in the region.
Read more: US mechanised battalion with heavy armour deploys to Lithuania
However, the move was used by Belarus and Russia to criticise the alleged build-up of NATO forces in the Baltic states.
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said the country would send troops to the Lithuanian border in response, but later backtracked.
Minsk officials also said military plans with Moscow under the Union State, now being renegotiated with the Kremlin, would be adjusted in response.
“We shouldn’t be particularly sensitive, knowing Russia’s reaction to even unimportant events,” said Linkevičius. “We even tell our allies we shouldn’t respond too sensitively to [Russia’s] reactions as they’re usually propaganda in nature.”
In June 2019, Washington already said it would send additional troops to Poland by redeploying them from Germany. Lithuania welcomed the move at the time, with the country’s defence minister Raimundas Karoblis saying “troops in Poland are the best thing for us”.
“I deeply hope that as a result of the many talks that we had [...] part of the troops based today in Germany which are being removed by the United States [...] will indeed come to Poland,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told a Polish radio station last week, according to Reuters. “The decision is now on the US side.”
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