By Andy Sullivan and Tyler Clifford
(Reuters) – Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Sunday that he and U.S. President Joe Biden will discuss possibly increasing U.S. troop presence in Poland and making it more permanent during Biden’s upcoming visit to Warsaw.
“We are in the process of discussion with President Biden’s administration about making their (troop) presence more permanent and increasing them,” Morawiecki said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“I’m very grateful also for sending new Patriot systems and other very modern weapons and munitions because this is also to some extent a proxy for presence of soldiers, but of course the two go in tandem,” he said.
Biden will visit Poland over Feb. 20-22 to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
The United States bolstered its troop presence in Poland ahead of the Feb. 24, 2022, invasion and currently has roughly 11,000 personnel on rotation there, according to CBS.
Biden said last June that the United States would set up a new permanent army headquarters in Poland in response to Russian threats.
Biden will meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda and Eastern European allies and speak about Ukraine, but has no plans to cross into neighboring Ukraine, according to the White House.
(Reporting by Andy Sullivan and Tyler Clifford; editing by Deepa Babington)
