The United States and Poland will next week open formal talks on a controversial missile defence shield that Washington wants to extend into central Europe, a US embassy official said Friday.
"We will start the first round of official talks on Monday," embassy spokesman Andrew Shilling told AFP.
"The first round of talks will be on the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, which deals with the status of US troops on foreign soil. Wherever the United States has forces overseas, we have a SOFA agreement in place," Shilling said.
The preliminary talks were expected to last a few days and be "pretty straight-forward," he said.
Negotiations will be taken up a level later this month, when a negotiating team led by US Assistant Secretary of State John Rood comes to Poland to discuss the missile shield, he added.
Washington wants to site 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a targeting radar in the Czech Republic as part of a missile defence system, which has already been deployed in the United States, Britain and Greenland.
Russia is angered by the plan to base the missile shield in its backyard, and remains unconvinced by Washington's assurances that the system would be used to defend Europe and the United States against eventual attacks from the Middle East, and Iran in particular.
The Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives has also voiced "political, economic and security concerns" over the missile shield, and earlier this month slashed 160 million dollars from the Republican administration's 310 million dollar request for the programme.
The White House warned that the cuts could jeopardize negotiations with Warsaw and Prague.
