President Joe Biden has reportedly directed Defence Department officials to deploy 2,000 UStroops from Fort Bragg, North Carolina to positions in Poland and Germany, and to reposition a 1,000-person brigade quartered in Germany to Romania.
The troop movements – first reported by The Wall Street Journal – are meant to bolster Nato’s eastern flank and deter a possible invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces.
Last week, Mr Biden also gave roughly 8,500 soldiers orders to make ready for possibly deployment to reinforce Nato allies.
Those forces remain on standby, and Pentagon officials who spoke to the Journal reportedly said other parts of the longstanding US military presence in Europe are expected to be repositioned strategically in hopes of making Russian President Vladimir Putin think twice before moving any of the more than 100,000 soldiers he has massed on his western border into Ukrainian territory.
The US troop movements come one day after Mr Putin hit out at Western countries for not heeding his demands that Nato categorically rule out Ukraine as a potential future member and roll back troop deployments in former Soviet satellites that have joined the alliance in the decades since the end of the Cold War.
Speaking at a Tuesday news conference with Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban, Mr Putin complained that “fundamental Russian concerns” had been “ignored” over weeks of talks.
The Russian strongman warned of a future scenario in which Ukraine joins Nato, then launches an offensive to clear Russian forces from territory illegally annexed during an earlier invasion in 2014.
“Let’s imagine Ukraine is a Nato member and starts these military operations. Are we supposed to go to war with the Nato bloc? Has anyone given that any thought? Apparently not,” he said.
In a statement made to the Russian Interfax news agency, Russian parliament foreign affairs committee deputy head Dmitry Novikov said the American troop movements would be “an absolutely destructive step” unless the reports of them were “an element of infoglut and fake news” meant for domestic American consumption.
“Not only can it complicate the situation in Ukraine and represent Nato and its leader, the US, as aggressive forces, but these actions can also be qualified as an attempt to hack the fragile negotiating process on security guarantees," Mr Novikov said. "If the US prompts the Russian Federation to give the toughest possible response by sending extra contingents, this should ultimately be more of a problem for them than for us”.
