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By Rafal Wojciech Nowak and Hedy Beloucif
REDZIKOWO, Poland (Reuters) - The United States opened a new air defence base in northern Poland on Wednesday, an event the European nation's president said showed the country was secure as a member of NATO even as Russia wages war in neighbouring Ukraine.
Situated in the town of Redzikowo near the Baltic coast, the base has been in the works since the 2000s.
At a time when Donald Trump's election victory has caused jitters among some NATO members, Warsaw says the continued work on the base by successive U.S. presidents shows Poland's military alliance with Washington remains solid whoever is in the White House.
"The United States... is the guarantor of Poland's security," President Andrzej Duda said.
He said the permanent presence of U.S. troops at the base showed that Poland, a communist state until 1989, was "not in the Russian sphere of influence".
The Kremlin on Wednesday called the base a bid to contain Russia by moving American military infrastructure nearer its borders.
The opening comes amid a nervous reaction among some NATO members to the election of Trump, who has vowed not to defend countries that do not spend enough on defence.
However, Poland says it should have nothing to fear as it is the alliance's biggest spender on defence relative to the size of its economy, and conservative Duda has stressed his warm ties with Trump.
MISSILE SHIELD
The U.S. base at Redzikowo is part of a broader NATO missile shield, dubbed "Aegis Ashore", which the alliance says can intercept short- to intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
Other key shield elements include a site in Romania, U.S. navy destroyers based in the Spanish port of Rota and an early-warning radar in Kurecik, Turkey.
Moscow had already labelled the base a threat as far back as 2007, when it was still being planned.
NATO says the shield is purely defensive.
Military sources told Reuters the system in Poland can now only be used against missiles fired from the Middle East and the radar would need a change in direction to intercept projectiles from Russia, a complex procedure entailing a change of policy.
Polish Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said on Monday the scope of the shield needed to be expanded, which Warsaw would discuss with NATO and the United States.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will meet Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Warsaw later on Wednesday.
(Reporting by Rafal Wojciech Nowak, Hedy Beloucif, Pawel Florkiewicz and Sabine Siebold; Additional reporting by Barbara Erling; Writing by Alan Charlish; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Toby Chopra)
