Poland has received a U.S. Patriot missile battery as per an agreement with NATO to increase the country’s air defenses.  The move may have been expected to irk Russia, but apparently the Kremlin is, so far, taciturn on the arrival.  The first EU-Eastern Partnership gathering in more than half a year has taken place in Sopot, in advance of the Russia-EU summit which will apparently focus on visa relaxation.  This meeting is supposedly to reassure the eastern states that their interests are not overshadowed.  Georgian deputy prime minister Georgi Baramidze has voiced skepticism about any Russian involvement in the Eastern Partnership.  Georgia’s main airline has resumed flights to Russia although apparently not on ‘political grounds’.  To attend the Sochi Olympics ‘would make all of us complicit in cementing in practice Russia’s changing European borders by force, even if we reject those changes in principle’.  How basketball is bringing the US and Russia closer.  From the Washington Post,  one of many recent articles arguing that Obama has paid a heavy price for the reset.  President Medvedev has suggested that there needs to be a 30% increase in the amount of modern weaponry in the army.  Having purchased a Mistral from France, Russia is apparently also contemplating similar offers from Spain and the Netherlands.  Alexander Golts discusses the ‘incompetence of the military at large and its fundamental inability to fight a war’ in an op-ed in the Moscow Times.