When US president George Bush arrives in Poland today to discuss a planned US missile base, he will fly into a swarm of protest and a row between the country's president and one of his predecessors, Lech Walesa.
Polish officials say today's talks are crucial for a US proposal to station interceptor rockets in Poland and link them to a radar in the Czech Republic, and have requested a political and security pact with Washington in return for hosting the missile base.
Dismissing US assertions that the system is designed to shoot down missiles fired by Iran or North Korea, Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin says it is aimed at Russia and has threatened to retaliate by training missiles on US bases in eastern Europe.
Earlier this week, Polish president Lech Kaczynski compared Mr Putin's rhetoric to that of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
"There has not been such a sharp conflict in Europe and in the world for a long time," said Mr Kaczynski, who will meet Mr Bush at his heavily guarded Baltic residence on the Hel Peninsula. There, they will be barracked from afar by protesters who have vowed to greet Mr Bush with banners reading: "Welcome to Hel(l)".
"We want to demonstrate against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Polish soldiers are deployed, and also against the project to install the so-called missile shield," said Filip Ilkowski of Poland's Stop the Wars movement.
Mr Bush will arrive from Germany at Gdansk's Lech Walesa Airport, but the former Solidarity chief and Polish president has accused Mr Kaczynski - with whom he has a long-running feud - of preventing him from meeting the US leader. "The office of the current president refused me this right," he said. "This is a diplomatic scandal."
