After the United States and Russia signed a new arms control treaty this week, President Barack Obama held his own "New Europe" summit in Prague to reassure the former Eastern Bloc countries that they had nothing to fear from his reset in ties with Russia.
Obama invited leaders of 11 former Soviet, Nato countries to dine with him at the US ambassador's residence this week in a bid to alleviate concerns in the region that his friendlier approach to Russia would come at their expense. "I arrived worried, but I'm departing with calm," Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters after the soiree.
The regional fears - which according to Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer were not articulated during the dinner - were expressed in an open letter to Obama in July signed by Eastern Europe's prominent former leaders and icons of communist resistance. The signatories, who included former Czech president Vaclav Havel, appealed to Obama not to side-track the former Eastern Bloc allies in order to reach out to Russia.
Some in the Czech Republic and Poland hailed the plans of Obama's predecessor, George W Bush, to build missile defence bases on their soil. While the system's stated purpose was to protect Europe from potential long-range missiles from Iran, Czech and Slovak backers viewed it as an extra buffer against the Kremlin's renewed assertiveness.
Moscow fiercely opposed the plan - a sign, alongside a brief war with Georgia in 2008, that it still aims to keep the region under its influence. When Obama revised the project last year, scrapping the Czech and Polish facilities, its Central European supporters were upset. It did not help that he relayed the news on the anniversary of the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland.
And when Obama signed a new arms reduction treaty with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev at the Prague Castle on Thursday, a symbol of the US-Russian thaw, his critics politely accused him of naivety in his dealings with Russia. "Moscow regards Western offers as an expression of weakness," Lubos Dobrovsky, a former Czech ambassador to Moscow and a signatory of the open letter to Obama, told the Hospodarske Noviny daily.
"That is according to me also the case of the signed treaty, which may be interpreted in Russia as Washington having accepted 'our demands'," he said. Obama pleased Russia with the decision to drop the Central European bases. But his revised plan to develop a missile shield against short- and medium-range missiles from Iran, potentially with parts in Romania and Bulgaria, continue to irk Moscow.
Russia has threatened to withdraw from the freshly signed treaty if it considers the US missile defence capabilities a breach to their strategic balance. Tusk, whose country should get a different set of interceptor missiles under the revamped system, indicated that Obama assured him that the Russian conditions would not alter the new US missile defence plans.
"What I heard sounded clear: From the point of view of the president of the USA and the American nation, signing START2 has no influence on work on the missile defence SM3 system," the Polish premier said. Not all the dinner guests appeared to share the concerns about the so-called reset in US-Russian relations. "I did not get any feeling that there was any kind of naivety," Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves told the German Press Agency dpa on Friday. He said that calmer ties between the US and Russia are also better for the ex-Soviet states.
While less than a year ago Russia accused Poland of triggering World War II by standing up to the Nazi Germany in 1939, the president observed, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was the first Russian leader to personally mark the anniversary this week of a Stalin-era massacre of Polish officers in Katyn. "Our friends to the East feel that people are paying attention to them and I think we can certainly detect a calming of the rhetoric," Ilves said. "I think that is strongly related to the US taking Russia seriously as an equal partner."