The U.S. military presence in Europe is about to get a lot bigger as fears of an unremarkable Vladimir Putin.
President Joe Biden announced the news at the NATO summit in Madrid on Wednesday, pointing the finger at the Russian leader, who has repeatedly claimed NATO expansion was the cause of the bloody attack on into Ukraine.
“In a moment where Putin has disrupted the peace in Europe and attacked the very tenets of the rules-based order of the United States and our allies – we are pushing,” Biden said.
The US military will now have permanent headquarters for the US 5th Army in Poland; will deploy an additional rotating combat brigade to Romania; “Intensify” rotational deployment to the Baltics (where there will be a “permanent, head-to-toe presence in the region”); deploying two more Navy destroyers to Spain; and two additional squadrons of F-35s to the UK, according to the White House.
The news is not expected to go well in Moscow, where the Kremlin has repeatedly declared US and NATO moves in Eastern Europe an existential threat to Russia.
While Putin has claimed his war against Ukraine is necessary to stop NATO, Western leaders say his plan has backfired spectacularly, giving only alliance members more decisiveness. attention and prompting other countries to join (especially Sweden and Finland).
“He is getting the opposite of what he wants. He wants less NATO, President Putin is getting more NATO,” Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday alongside Western leaders in Madrid.
The comments come as Russian forces intensify their attacks on Ukraine, just hours after drawing international condemnation for a air strike on a Ukrainian shopping center at least 20 people were killed.
Putin’s military launched 10 missiles at a residential area in the Mykolaiv region and killed at least four people there on Wednesday morning, according to Ukrainian authorities.
Anna Zamazeyeva, head of the Mykolaiv regional council, speak Some residents are still trapped beneath the rubble of the bombed apartment building.
“The latest terrorist attack — the city of Mykolaiv was hit with a missile. At least 10 rockets in half an hour,” Zamazeyeva wrote in a statement on Telegram, describing it as a “direct strike” on an apartment building.
“Mykolaiv is being ‘erased on the face of the earth’ like Mariupol, Volnovakha and other cities? What are we waiting for, international community? ” she writes.
In Dnipr, a 6-year-old child was among seven people injured in a similar strike, the authorities there speak.
The latest attacks come as many are still reeling from the civilian deaths reported a day earlier.
Mykola Kuleba, Ukraine’s ombudsman for children’s rights, shared a brutal photo on social media of one of the victims of the Russian attack on the city of Ochakiv on Tuesday.
Older brother Written. “Her body was found under the rubble. This photo should be everywhere.”
