‘We waited for decades’: Polish govt welcomes US troops
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WARSAW, Poland — Polish leaders welcomed U.S. troops to their country Saturday, with the defence minister expressing gratitude for their arrival and calling it the fulfilment of a dream Poles have had for decades.
The ceremony in the western Polish town of Zagan comes some 23 years after the last Soviet troops left Poland. It marks a new historic moment — the first time Western forces are being deployed on a continuous basis to NATO’s eastern flank. The move has infuriated Moscow.
“We have waited for you for a very long time,” Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz told the troops as snow fell. “We waited for decades, sometimes feeling we had been left alone, sometimes almost losing hope, sometimes feeling that we were the only one who protected civilization from aggression that came from the east.”
The American deployment includes an armoured brigade of 3,500 American troops from Fort Carson, Colorado. It comes in reactions to Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and its backing of separatist insurgents in Ukraine’s east.
