Warsaw - Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski branded joint Russia and Belarus army exercises near his country's border this September "disquieting", in a radio interview Thursday. Taking part in the exercises, known as Zapad-2009 (West-2009), were 6,000 Russian service personnel, 6,500 Belorussians and 30 Kazakh military personnel. The maneuvers included 228 tanks and 103 combat and transport aircraft.
"We want to have the best possible relations with Russia," Sikorski told Polish radio station Trojka. "It's nice when we mutually make friendly gestures. And it disquiets us when Russia conducts such maneuvers near our borders. And naturally we inform the alliance (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) of this and demand that the alliance takes this under consideration in its work."
The Russian and Belorussian soldiers conducted two weeks of joint training that began on September 18. They included war games and operational exercises near the Belorussian border with Poland.
Sikorski's comments came as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev gave his annual state-of-the-nation address Thursday in Moscow.
Sikorski declined to talk about details of his message to NATO's secretary general, saying the correspondence was not made public, but "it isn't a mystery that maneuvers so close to our borders disquiet us."
"We also train," Sikorski told Trojka. "But I think the alliance should take under consideration the sensitivities of relatively new member states."
In his state-of-the nation address last year, Medvedev said that Russia would deploy short-range Iskander missiles in its Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad in answer to US plans to site a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic.
