Poland accepted the US offer and one part of the missile shield is going to be located in Poland.
The first Russian response was to huff and puff, they said that Poland was now a nuclear target.
But there is something more dangerous happening, look at this:
Russia is considering arming its Baltic fleet with nuclear warheads for the first time since the cold war, senior military sources warned last night.
More cold war after the flip
The Russian Baltic fleet uses Kaliningrad as a base, the land area between Lithuania and Poland. A very good place for nuclear weapons if you want to make threats.
Under the Russian plans, nuclear warheads could be supplied to submarines, cruisers and fighter bombers of the Baltic fleet based in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between the European Union countries of Poland and Lithuania. A senior military source in Moscow said the fleet had suffered from underfunding since the collapse of communism. "That will change now," said the source.
The Times
Well, it is not like the missile shield -deal would go without a response. Now you have it, nuclear weapons closer to Poland.
The Russians have already indicated that they may point nuclear missiles at western Europe from bases in Kaliningrad and Belarus. They are also said to be thinking of reviving a military presence in Cuba.
The Times
Cuba would be a very interesting move, i guess having a Russian "missile shield" there would be ok for the US?
Ukraine seems to be making threats, so Russia is careful in this game. And Russia has big problems to deal with, so losing Ukraine completely would cause problems in the black sea.
The reaction between the US and old EU members is quite different. The reason is very simple:
Trade between Russia and the EU jumped 23 percent in 2007 to $284 billion, making the EU Russia's biggest trading partner and Russia the bloc's third-largest partner. The EU also depends on Russia to supply a quarter of its natural gas.
Link
So it is rather easy to use big words (like McCain does), but you pretty much share a border with Russia..things are different. But there is some history involved and it can be seen in this:
``The divisions within Europe are more pronounced than those between two sides of the Atlantic,'' said Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. ``There's a host of new democracies in Europe that continue to worry they will again fall prey to Russian expansion.''
Poland and the Baltic states, all once held within the Soviet Union's embrace and now members of the European Union, rallied behind Georgia yesterday.
Link
And of course EU can't do much:
With Europe's two largest military powers, Britain and France, struggling to meet commitments abroad, the softer EU tone also reflects lack of force. The British army is overstretched with about 11,000 combat troops spread between Afghanistan and Iraq, while France's similar-sized fighting force is spread among Afghanistan, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia and Africa.
Even the U.S., which has 150,000 soldiers tied down in Iraq and a force of 36,000 in Afghanistan, probably can't spare many more to shore up Georgia.
``The Americans can't do very much,'' said Jan Techau, a security analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. ``The Europeans are united in powerlessness.''
Link
I think final analysis is very brutal and true.
In the end Russia is still weak and will try to stop Ukraine and other former soviet states from joining the west. How ever, there is one problem for those countries; the western friends are far away, the enemy is close.
So, what do you think? How to avoid more conflicts?
EDIT: Here is Andrew Sullivan and his pretty interesting look at John McCain and projecting power. Scary stuff.
If it’s war we want, McCain will deliver