In Poland both the previous centrist government and the current right-wing one pushed hard for a permanent NATO presence | Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty Images Central and Eastern Europeans feel less like 2nd class NATO allies Deploying 1000s of troops on Alliance’s eastern flank, vindicates the region’s calls for robust response to Moscow.

WARSAW — NATO opened its doors to members from Central Europe in 1999, but the Alliance’s military footprint made only the tiniest of toeholds in the region.

The headquarters of a multinational Polish-Danish-German corps is located on the outskirts of the city of Szczecin, just 10 kilometers from Poland's border with Germany. Since 1999, it's been the Alliance's only permanent presence in any of the countries that had once been behind the Iron Curtain.

But the lonely status of the Szczecin base is now changing. The NATO summit that took place in Warsaw over the weekend had the Alliance pledging to deploy four battalions totaling about 4,000 troops to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to defend the Eastern flank against Russia.

NATO was careful to stress that the multinational force will consist of soldiers being rotated through the four battalions — a bit of a semantic trick to avoid calling this a permanent presence of the Alliance's forces in the region.

The reason: NATO doesn't want to completely scrap the 1997 agreement it struck with Russia, under which it agreed that “in the current and foreseeable security environment” the alliance will defend its new members by methods other “than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces.”

Even with that caveat, the Central Europeans taking part in the Warsaw summit felt that the deployment marks a significant departure in NATO strategy, ending what many in that part of Europe had long seen as a second class status in the Alliance.

“This is the essence of this summit. It’s no longer just words but now we’re seeing actions,” said Adam Daniel Rotfeld, a former Polish foreign minister. “The gap between old and new members is being eroded.”

Lithuania’s foreign minister, Linas Linkevičius, pointed out that while the single battalion that will become operational on Lithuanian territory under German command next year won’t be enough to stop a Russian invasion, “it does give more credibility and security. It is exactly what we expected.”

Leaders of Central European countries have long called for NATO to ignore the Founding Act on relations between NATO and Russia and build permanent bases on their territory, giving Poland, Estonia and Romania the same kind of security blanket enjoyed by Italy, Germany and Belgium and other West European countries.

“Presence is not a provocation. Absence is,” Witold Waszczykowski, Poland’s foreign minister, said in a speech at an event accompanying the NATO summit.

In Poland, despite the very deep political divisions, both the previous centrist government and the current right-wing one pushed hard for a permanent NATO presence. Radek Sikorski, the former foreign minister, called for the stationing of two heavy brigades in Poland. Andrzej Duda, the current president, told POLITICO not long after being elected last year: “I feel that there should be NATO bases, American armies or common Polish-American bases” in Poland.

“The gap between old and new members is being eroded.”— Adam Daniel Rotfeld.

But for many years Western Europe and the U.S. downplayed those calls, seeing them as a regional post-traumatic stress syndrome following decades of Central and Eastern Europe being part of the Soviet empire. The counter-argument was that post-Soviet Russia was a different country. That language comes through in the second paragraph of the Founding Act, which notes: “NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries.”

Roman Kuźniar, a former foreign policy adviser to the previous Polish president, noted that Russia’s increasing authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin and even the 2008 war against Georgia failed to change the narrative that Russia was a partner, not a potential foe. That changed after Russia invaded and then annexed Crimea two years ago, and helped foment an armed uprising in eastern Ukraine.

“Our voice was ignored until Putin bared his teeth,” Kuźniar said.

Taking the East seriously

NATO shifted its position during the 2014 Wales summit, and the Warsaw declaration makes clear that there is no going back to “business as usual” with Russia.

Now the Central Europeans feel vindicated in their warnings about Russia’s intentions.

Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, called the deployment decision “ground breaking.”

“It's an open-ended commitment and it will last as long as necessary, so we don’t have any date where we have said that this will end. And it is a new reality, because we didn’t have that kind of presence in the eastern part of the alliance before,” he said.

He went onto blame Russia’s military modernization, rearmament and its use of military force against Ukraine as “the reason why we have increased our presence in the eastern part of the alliance.”

Central Europeans immediately zeroed in on the fact that this is not a temporary stationing of Alliance troops on their territory.

“This is a breakthrough that unambiguously demonstrates NATO's solidarity and the fact that Estonia is better protected today than ever before,” Estonian Prime Minister Taavi Rõivas said in a statement.

In one of the 139 points of NATO’s communiqué at the Warsaw summit, specific mention is made of the Szczecin headquarters, which is to become “fully operational” — something that hasn’t happened since it was founded almost 17 years ago.

Annabelle Chapman contributed to this article.