Lithuania, Poland plan to create council of defense ministers

VILNIUS - Lithuania and Poland plan to create a council of defense ministers, a presidential advisor said on Tuesday. 

"Plans call for creating a council of defense ministers that would convene at least once a year and would oversee our defensive issues," Nerijus Aleksiejunas told Ziniu Radijas, commenting on President Dalia Grybauskaite's upcoming visit to Poland.

Aleksiejunas said the visit will focus on defense and security issues, adding that the Lithuanian and Polish presidents plan to issue a joint declaration on security issues. 

"Two agreements between the defense ministers will also be signed. One (of the agreements) concerns the exchange of information on airspace surveillance radars and the other is about a certain affiliation of Lithuanian and Polish brigades, a kind of twinning within NATO," he said.  

The advisor said this will help the two neighboring countries' brigades to cooperate even more closely in defending the so-called "Suwalki gap", is a land strip of around 100 kilometers on the Lithuanian-Polish border that is wedged between the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad on the west and Belarus on the east. 

"The visit will bring our cooperation with Poland to a different level, and I think this is an excellent illustration of the years of cooperation that have led to such decisions," he added. 

Grybauskaite is scheduled to meet with President Andrzej Duda, Marek Kuchcinski, the speaker of the Sejm, Stanislaw Karczewski, the speaker of the Senate, and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki during her official visit to Poland on Thursday and Friday. 

The Lithuanian president, together with her Polish and Ukrainian counterparts, will also to travel to Lublin to visit the LITPOLUKRBRIG brigade headquarters in the Polish city and mark the 450th anniversary of the signing of the Union of Lublin.