President Biden has approved the deployment of about 3,000 additional American troops to eastern Europe, administration officials said on Wednesday. The troops, including 1,000 already in Germany, will head to Poland and Romania, the Pentagon spokesman, John F. Kirby, said. Their purpose will be to reassure Nato allies that while the US has no intention of sending troops into Ukraine, where President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been threatening an invasion, Biden will protect America’s Nato allies from any Russian aggression.

“It's important that we send a strong signal to Putin and the world that Nato matters,” Kirby told reporters at a news conference. “We are making it clear that we are going to be prepared to defend out Nato allies if it comes to that.”

At the moment, Russia is threatening Ukraine, not Romania or Poland. But Putin has made clear his distaste for both Nato and the post-Cold War redrawing of the map of Europe, which put former Soviet republics and satellite countries in the West’s foremost military alliance at his doorstep.

The President’s decision comes days after Pentagon leaders said that Putin had deployed the necessary troops and military hardware to conduct an invasion of Ukraine. Senior defence department officials also said that the tense standoff was leading the US, its Nato allies and Russia into uncharted territory. The number of Russian troops assembled at Ukraine’s borders has reached well north of 100,000, the officials said, publicly confirming for the first time what intelligence analysts have described for weeks.

Close to 2,000 of the troops — most of them coming from the 82nd Airborne in Fort Bragg, North Carolina — will be going to Poland, Kirby said. While many of those troops are paratroopers, Kirby said he did not expect the Airborne troops to deploy to Poland in a “tactical operation”, which would raise the ire of Russia even more. The troops being moved to Romania will complement French troops being deployed there,Kirby said. The administration has not ruled out sending additional troops to Europe, and still has 8,500 American troops on “high alert” for possible deployment to a Nato rapid response force.

Kirby also said there would be no change in the status of the small number of American troops in Ukraine. More than 150 US military advisers are in Ukraine, trainers who have for years worked near Lviv, in the country’s west, far from the front lines. The current group includes Special Operations forces, mostly Army Green Berets, as well as National Guard trainers from Florida’s 53rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team. “It’s a big, unambiguous signal,” said Jim Townsend, a former top Pentagon official.

New York Times News Service