Free Zone The dangers of a blank check to Ukraine
War Biden's trip to kyiv: months of preparation, 10 hours by train and notice to Moscow
US President Joe Biden has arrived in Poland after a lightning visit to kyiv that was prepared in secret but with advance notice to Moscow for months.
The visit to Warsaw, on the other hand, had been announced in advance and the government of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who will contest parliamentary elections in the fall, will try to get the most out of it, politically and military.
In an interview this weekend with CBS, Morawiecki announced that he intends to speak with Biden
about the possibility of Washington increasing the number of US troops permanently stationed in
Poland
.
The United States already increased its presence in that country before the Russian invasion.
Currently, it has around 11,000 soldiers rotating in the country.
Poland's willingness to host the more US troops and military systems on its soil the better is not new.
The war in Ukraine, of which Biden marked a sad first anniversary, has reinforced that desire.
At the beginning of the month, the Polish Deputy Foreign Minister, Arkadiusz Mularczyk, already stated that his government would like the US president to announce the establishment of permanent NATO military bases in Poland on his next visit to this country.
Mularczyk admitted that "it is a decision that depends on the United States",
but hinted that there will be news about it
.
"I would not like to get ahead of President Biden, we will soon know what his plans and decisions are."
At the NATO summit in Madrid in June last year, Biden announced that the permanent headquarters of the US Fifth Army Corps would be established in Poland.
And in that direction, he agrees that the United States approved the sale of HIMARS rocket launchers to Poland worth some 10,000 million euros, a contract that joins other important purchases of US weapons made in recent months by Warsaw.
The American president's schedule in Poland is tight.
He will deliver a speech on the occasion of the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda, and before returning to Washington on Wednesday he will
meet with the leaders of the
Bucharest Nine
, a group made up of the flanking countries. NATO East (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia).
Ukraine has been requesting cluster munitions from NATO partners for a year, as confirmed by the German agency to representatives of several allied countries.
Ukraine's request, about which nothing was publicly known until Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba put it into words at the Munich Security Conference, has caused a stir.
According to these sources, Ukrainian government officials after the Russian invasion asked US President Joe Biden and members of Congress to provide them with cluster munition warheads.
The White House has yet to reject that request outright.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the Munich summit that the alliance "supplies artillery and other types of weapons, but not cluster munitions."
The issue, however, is that
not all NATO countries have signed the Oslo convention on the prohibition of the use, production, acquisition, stockpiling and transfer of cluster munitions
.
Among those countries are Poland, Romania, Latvia and Estonia.
According to information from the Estonian radio station ERR, Estonia has considered the possibility of transferring cluster munitions to Ukraine.
These would be 155 mm artillery shells of the DM632 type and DM1385 submunitions from the German manufacturer Rheinmetall.
Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said then, without elaborating, that his country was trying to obtain the necessary permits for more military aid to Ukraine.
The decision to supply this type of ammunition to Kiev is still up in the air, but Germany, which is part of the Oslo Convention, will prevent the transfer of the output of German factories.
"Any re-export request would conflict with obligations under the Cluster Munitions Convention or under Article 18a of the War Weapons Control Act," a spokeswoman for the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology said.
Ukraine's demands for the handover of cluster munitions and phosphorus incendiary weapons caused great surprise at the Munich Security Conference.
The deputy head of the Government, Olexander Kubrakov, explained that the United States and other allies have millions of cartridges that would be of great help to his army.
Kuleba also noted that Ukraine has not signed the international treaty banning the use of cluster munitions, so legally, "there are no obstacles to Ukraine's use of cluster munitions."
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