Lithuanian President Gitanas Naušeda said today that he supports the idea put forward by his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda to see the deployment of NATO nuclear missiles in his country as a deterrent to Russia.
The two presidents discussed security issues when they met to watch NATO military exercises inside the “Suwalki Corridor”, a 65km strip of land dividing the union between Poland and Lithuania, Moscow’s ally Belarus and the Russian enclave of heavily armed Kaliningrad.
“The idea of developing nuclear weapons is not warmongering, nor threatening to Russia, it is an element of deterrence,” the Lithuanian president told reporters.
His Polish counterpart, conservative Andrzej Duda, this week proposed deploying NATO nuclear weapons on his country’s soil to counter missiles deployed by Russia in Kaliningrad and Belarus, an idea not supported by her liberal government country but which provoked the wrath of Moscow. Duda, however, defended the idea again today.
“The entirety of NATO territory, as we understand it, must be properly and adequately protected, and it is therefore very logical that a nuclear mechanism could be redeployed to NATO’s eastern flank,” he said. “As one of these countries, we have declared that we are ready to accept these weapons,” he added.
The two presidents made these statements during military exercises involving 1,500 NATO troops to test various defense scenarios in the Suwalki Corridor, which is considered the Alliance’s weak point in the region.
Source: APE-MPE, AFP
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