New NATO member states in the Baltics and Central Europe see Russia, their former ally, as their greatest security threat and are worried about closer ties between Moscow and Washington, according to diplomatic cables released Tuesday by WikiLeaks.
Ironically, the same batch of cables describe Washington's concern about the pro-Russian stance of France, saying that the sale of Mistral helicopter carriers to Russia sent a "mixed signal" to Moscow - presumably because they could be deployed in the Baltic and Black seas, dpa reported.
Just months before Washington abandoned plans in 2009 to base a long-range missile defence shield in Poland, a top Polish official told a US senator visiting Warsaw that his government was worried that NATO wouldn't honour its commitment to collective defence.
"We still have our doubts," Witold Waszczykowski, then-deputy chief of Poland's National Security Bureau, told US Senator Carl Levin, according to a May 7, 2009, cable from the US embassy in Warsaw.
Waszczykowski was quoted as saying that some NATO members - France in particular - were more interested in talk than action.
He and other Polish officials "requested that the US keep Poland updated on the status of of dialogue with Russia, suggesting that Russia, not Iran, poses the greater threat to Poland," the cable said.
"How long will it take you to realize that nothing will change with Iran and Russia?" Waszczykowski was quoted as asking.
Later in 2009, leaders of the three former Soviet Baltic republics - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - sought "contingency planning" in case of an attack, according to a cable from the US NATO mission.
The cable, dated October 20, 2009, said that such planning would be difficult, "particularly if it would require specifying Russia as a potential threat" - a contradiction to current NATO policy.
The dispatch concluded that a proposed revision of a contingency plan for Poland could include reinforcement of the Baltic states' defences. That change was subsequently carried out, according to cables.
A dispatch from the US embassy in Paris in February 2010 describes a sharp exchange of views between US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and Herve Morin, France's foreign minister, over a revamped European missile shield and the sale of military equipment to Russia.
Gates "raised US concerns over the sale of a Mistral-class helicopter carrier to Russia as sending a mixed signal to both Russia and our Central and Eastern European allies."
He pointed out that French President Nicolas Sarkozy had brokered a ceasefire between Georgia and Russia after the 2008 conflict that "Russia was not fully honoring," the cable said.
Morin "asked rhetorically how we can tell Russia we desire a partnership but then not trust them."
Grigol Vashadze, Georgia's foreign minister, is described in an earlier cable from Tbilisi as saying that other arms-supplying countries, such as Spain and the Netherlands, were looking at the Mistral deal as a signal on whether to begin their own sales to Russia
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