The U.S. will send 5,000 additional troops to Romania and increase rotational deployments in the Baltic states, President Joe Biden said Wednesday at a NATO summit in Madrid.
President Klaus Iohannis welcomed the move. “All our objectives, I repeat all our objectives … have been met and resolved in the way we wanted! This is a result of team work, and I want to thank everyone involved,” he said from the summit.
“What’s more, Russia has been defined as the main threat to Euro-Atlantic security… that’s what Romania asked for in the final statement of the Bucharest Nine summit we hosted a few weeks ago.”
Direct threat
NATO declared Russia the “most significant and direct threat” to its members’ peace and security Wednesday and vowed to strengthen support for Ukraine, even as President Volodymr Zelensky griped that the alliance had not done enough to help it defeat Russia.
NATO held its summit in Madrid five months after Russia invaded its neighbor. The alliance has poured troops and weapons into eastern Europe on a scale unseen in decades.
Sweden and Finland, who were previously non-aligned, are seeking the protection of membership.
Poland
Biden also announced that the U.S. would establish a permanent headquarters for its 5th Army Corps in Poland which shares a long border with Ukraine as part of efforts to stiffen NATO’s first line of defenses against possible attack.
Two squadrons of US F-35 fighter aircraft will be sent to the UK, the U.S. president added, in addition to stationing air defense systems in Italy and Germany and increasing the number of US naval destroyers to Spain to six from four.
The new deployments will be in addition to the more than 100,000 US troops currently stationed in Europe, which had already increased by about 20,000 since Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine four months ago.
Russia’s war
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that Russia’s war in Ukraine had created Europe’s biggest security crisis since World War II.
The military alliance was set up after the war to counter the threat from the Soviet Union.
