Ukraine Crisis: the core dilemma Washington faces in the current crisis is how to reassure and protect Eastern European partners without employing U.S. forces — a step that could lead to destabilizing escalation on both sides.

Poland's Air Defenses Become 

A Pressing Concern For Washington

by Loren Thompson

Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s campaign to annex the Crimean Peninsula has raised military tensions in Eastern Europe as former Soviet republics and their western neighbors wonder what Moscow’s next move might be. Although the Crimea was part of Russia for centuries before Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev folded it into the Ukrainian republic in 1954, military planners in Eastern Europe’s capitals can’t ignore the possibility that Putin might seek to recover other lost territories. One place where people are especially apprehensive is Poland, a country of 38 million that joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004 but shares borders with three former Soviet republics and the Russian enclave at Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.

With few natural barriers to keep invaders out, the Poles are counting on western allies to back up their own indigenous defense efforts. Western nations in turn need Warsaw’s support for whatever sanctions they impose on Russia to deter further expansionist moves. But history has taught the Poles that they can’t count on other nations to save them, so long before the Ukraine crisis unfolded, Warsaw decided to buy a network of defenses against overhead threats originating in Russia. Called the Polish Shield, the $43 billion project would be able to counter fighters, bombers, drones, cruise missiles and tactical ballistic missiles. Longer-range ballistic missiles could be handled by land- and sea-based defenses the U.S. is deploying to the region.

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