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The Polish government has offered to let the United States build a major military base on its territory, although to ease worries about the move in neighbouring Russia the facility is likely to be build in the west of the country, the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza said on Thursday. A spokesman for the defence ministry, which the paper said had made the offer, refused to comment but did not deny the report. "No decision has been made and it is too soon to talk about it," spokesman Adam Stasinski told AFP. Gazeta Wyborcza said the ministry had proposed the small western Polish town of Powidz, already the site of a military airstrip, as the site for the future base. It also quoted an unnamed Polish civil servant as saying that a delegation from the US State Department which had recently visited Moscow had sought to allay Russian fears about the building of a base in Poland, and had noted Russia's desire to not see the base sited to the east of the River Vistula, which runs south-north through the capital Warsaw to the Baltic Sea port of Gdansk. "The United States has submitted an overall plan for a new deployment of their armed forces, and we are drawing up proposals which meet their expectations," the Polish official was quoted as saying. Powidz, which is 50 kilometres (30 miles) east of the city of Poznan, already hosts a large military air base, which the unnamed official said was "comparable to the US base at Ramstein in Germany." Polish officials, including Prime Minister Leszek Miller, have on several occasions said they are in favour of hosting US military bases. The issue was discussed with US Deputy Defense Secretary Douglas Feith when he visited Warsaw on December 8 last year. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Poland was part of the communist bloc. It joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999, and is due to become a member of the European Union in May this year. All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse. Quick Links
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