“It’s a breakthrough, but for the time being, only in thinking,” said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk after the Warsaw meeting of the Visegrad Group. The leaders of the Central European alliance sat down with French President François Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on March 6 to discuss plans to coordinate the group’s defence policy.

Gazeta Wyborcza stresses the summit was the first such meeting of the Visegrad 4 (V4) with Merkel and Hollande, something that would have been unthinkable for example during Jacques Chirac’s presidency. “Even though the cooperation between the Visegrad Group countries has never been as smooth as with the Scandinavian countries”, the daily notes –

This is not the same Europe [as during Chirac’s times]. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and even crisis-hit Hungary are not posing such problems to Europe as the countries of the south.

Also the Slovak daily Pravda underlines the presence of Merkel-Hollande at the V4 summit in Warsaw and further reports that “Slovakia will participate in a special Visegrad battle group”. The V4 countries signed a letter of intent to set up a joint defence battle group until 2016 composed of approximately 3,000 soldiers. Poland would assure the main part of the unit’s military strength, up to 1,600 soldiers, with the Czech Republic offering mainly paramedics and logistics, while Hungary provides military engineering and Slovakia the expertise on weapons of mass destruction.