Prime Minister Szydło hails NATO summit success for Poland

During a Monday press conference, Prime Minister Beata Szydło commended last week’s NATO summit in Warsaw, calling it a “great success for Poland”.

Szydło said that the decisions taken at the two-day gathering has paved the way for a boost in Poland’s safety in the region. ”The event will go down in history as a summit that charted a new security map for the world,” Szydło told journalists. “It has bolstered Poland’s security. NATO forces will be present on Polish territory. All our expectations concerning strategic decisions have been met,” she said.

The NATO summit brought an outcome that Poles had been waiting for, for decades, Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz said at Monday’s press conference. “From the perspective of national interest and Polish history, the gathering is an event that entire generations had been waiting for, perhaps, since World War II, dreaming that we could finally feel safe,” Macierewicz said. “From NATO’s perspective, the summit has reoriented its structure and redirected efforts towards defending its eastern and southern flank,” he added.

During the two-day summit in Warsaw, NATO country leaders announced the Alliance would deploy four multinational battalions to Poland and three Baltic countries, which fear potential Russian aggression following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

During the summit, NATO leaders also pledged to strengthen their cyber defences, and declared “initial operational capability” of NATO’s ballistic missile defence system. “This means that the US ships based in Spain, the radar in Turkey, and the interceptor site in Romania are now able to work together under NATO command and NATO control,” said NATO chief Stoltenberg said at a press conference on Friday.

The military alliance will help its partners fight against the so-called Islamic State, provide AWACS surveillance aircraft to help tackle terrorism, and will launch a new security operation in the Mediterranean named Sea Guardian.

NATO country leaders also declared the alliance would extend its Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan beyond 2016. They agreed to provide financial support for the Afghan armed forces and police until 2020, but said they expected the country to implement reforms.

On the sidelines of the summit, Polish Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz and his Turkish counterpart on Saturday signed a letter of intent on expanding electronic warfare capabilities.
The summit, which brought 21 prime ministers and 18 presidents to Poland including US leader Barack Obama, was the largest such gathering to date.