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American and Polish soldiers attend a welcome ceremony of the US troops convoy in Zagan, Poland, Thursday, Jan. 12, 2017. First U.S. troops arrived at the Zagan base in western Poland as part of deterrence force of some 1,000 troops to be based here and reassure Poland that is worried about Russia’s activity.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo Credit: Czarek Sokolowski\/AP<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n “These actions threaten our interests, our security,” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday. “Especially as it concerns a third party building up its military presence near our borders. It’s not even a European state.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Worries about the permanence of the new U.S. security commitments are rooted in a tragic national history in which Poland has often lost out in deals made by the great powers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Poles still feel betrayed by Obama’s “reset” with Russia early on in his administration, which involved abandoning plans for a major U.S. missile defense system in Poland and replacing it with plans for a less ambitious system, still not in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “All recent U.S. presidents have thought there can be a grand bargain with Russia,” said Marcin Zaborowski, a senior associate at Visegrad Insight, an analytic journal on Central Europe. “Trump has a proclivity to make deals, and Central and Eastern Europe have reason to worry about that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski expressed hope this week that any new effort at reconciliation with Russia “does not happen at our expense.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The armored brigade combat team arriving in Poland hails from Fort Carson, Colorado. The troops arrived last week in Germany and are gathering in Poland before units will fan out across seven countries from Estonia to Bulgaria. A headquarters unit will be stationed in Germany. After nine months they will be replaced by another unit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a separate but related mission, NATO will also deploy four battalions to its eastern flank later this year, one each to Poland and the three Baltic states. The U.S. will also lead one of those battalions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" American soldiers rolled into Poland on Thursday, fulfilling a dream some Poles have had since the fall of communism in 1989 to have U.S. troops on their soil as a deterrent against Russia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":80312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":70,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[12,70],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3002],"class_list":["post-43263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-your-army"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"2MHBGZ4DTBHXLM36GE4DHIFOE4","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-military\/2017\/01\/12\/u-s-troops-enter-poland-1st-deployment-at-russia-s-doorstep\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n