NATO ΑΒΜ Shield in Europe and Russia's response

No targets, it is just a reason to put US troops in the country so they can earn some US dollars through the US having a base there.
Having all the radars for the Patriot system might have been useful 30 years ago, but these days NATO has all sorts of radars stationed around Russian borders looking in, particularly in the former baltic republics, so a few extra wont matter that much.

Exactly.

There is no real military threat, this is all politics, which of course means common sense has nothing to do with decisions.

For the politicians, for the american ones it looks like they are standing up to Russia, and that they are backing their European allies and it reaffirms that Iran is a world threat even though they appear to just want to be left alone.
For the Polish politicians having US forces in Poland means they are no longer under the Russian thumb and that they can do what they want.
It also means easy votes... look at us, we are spending a lot of money to keep our citizens safe. Hope no one notices that we are actually putting them in more danger simply because an ABM shield in europe will make Iran think of new ways to "defend themselves".

Personally I have thought that the US campaign against Iran is because they don't want any country in that region except Israel to have the kind of satellite intell they have of other countries in the region and that they are treating Irans rocket program as an ICBM program to strike the US when in fact it is rather more likely aimed at Israel and getting independant access to space.

When Iran is doing things itself it is being untrustworthy, which is suspicious, but when India wants to lease a Russian nuclear powered sub so it can learn lessons to develop its own nuclear powered sub people are less suspicious of India.

India is lucky it has no large oil reserves I guess.

I would trust Iran more with nuclear weapons than I trust Pakistan to be honest.

I think the best solution for the middle east is either for everyone to have nukes or for no one to have nukes, and neither of those are likely.

Yes, the irony is that they don't object to being someones b!tch, it seems they just want a choice as to whose b!tch they will be.

Perhaps if communism had been more successful and provided them with a comfortable lifestyle they didn't have to work to hard to achieve they would have preferred that.

The huge irony is of course that the huge oppression they blame Russia for, when you talk to them and ask them about it turns out most of it was Stalin, which is of course ironic because Stalin was Georgian and treated Russian people the same as he treated the other Soviet people... like a means to an end.

What you don't see much is there are refuelling trucks the Russians use that are built to look a lot like their missile trucks so it is not just a case of finding a needle in a haystack, it is finding a needle in a haystack that also has fake needles in it too.
Regarding the original topic I think Russia simply doesn't trust the US, and why would they?
The US has said many things since the end of the Cold War, including stuff like NATO will not expand, and then NATO will not expand into the former Soviet republics and then US troops will not be stationed in former Eastern European nations etc etc. There were lots of other promises, like if you drop communism you will be welcomed into the international community.
All were verbal promises and most were broken.
Now they claim Iran is a threat to the US (note these GBI missiles they wanted to put in Poland are mid course interceptors and intercept targets thousands of kms up in space and would only be useful against ICBMs about half way to their target, so they would only be useful against Iranian missiles heading for the US and offer no protection for Europe... which is why they didn't consult NATO or the EU) but they will only put 10 interceptors in Poland.
Well in 5 years that might change to 50 interceptors and there would not be much Russia could do about it.
Once they start construction they could build as many launch silos as they liked and there is no verification requirements or legal limitations on numbers.
It would come down to cost and political will.
Of course a defence shield to stop nuclear weapons raining down on US voters is easy to sell, and any complaints from Russia sound like sour grapes because they cant afford such an expensive system.
It is some times called the thin edge of the wedge.
The reality is of course that ABM systems effect your nuclear strike capability. Russian nuclear weapons are not just going to be fired at the US, they will have some aimed at Europe and China and Japan etc too.
Those aimed at Europe could be engaged from Poland... remember these are mid flight interceptors so they don't intercept warheads they are supposed to get the whole warhead bus with all the warheads still in it.
A Russian launch of and SS-18 at Europe will fly a very high path but if a GBI can hit it mid course on its way to say British military bases a single GBI can take out all the 10 warheads and probably about 30 decoys that would be on board that warhead bus.
Indeed Europe might simply be covered by just 10 x SS-18s with 100 warheads. This is of course a worst case scenario, though the RS-24 is supposed to be equipped with 10 warheads too.
So Russia protested, as is Russias right to do and I think it is better for everyone that they did.
Americans love technology... imagine the danger to the world if an American president believed his underlings that told him he had an ICBM shield and could do as he wishes.
He might even start a war thinking he was safe from return fire but any air defence can be bypassed... any country in the world can build a small plane, put an autopilot on it and (the hard bit) a nuclear device and fire it off in the direction of a whole country. In this case what the Americans claim is only a defensive system (why are you so worked up about it?) becomes a shield to hide behind and attack from. In other words it makes the attack more likely rather than less likely. It makes nuclear war more likely because those behind the shield FEEL safe even if they actually are not. It ruins MAD, which works because there is no requirement for trust for MAD to work. Anything else requires trust.
You might have heard of the member of the Club family that can be launched from a shipping container... how much modification would be needed to redesign it so that it will sink to the sea bottom when the container falls of the ship and after a set delay time of a week or month launch a small subsonic stealthy cruise missile with a small nuclear warhead. There are probably currently hundreds of thousands of shipping crates in the open ocean that have fallen of container ships just floating around till either they are recovered or hit by something or just sink.

Not only more funds for Iskander.

A sea based missile defence means that it can with enough warning sail to anywhere in the world... the most mobile of ABM systems. If there was a real threat to the US these vessels could be position around the US and the country that is the threat at the time like North Korea for example.

If the next START agreement goes to 800 weapons each and then the next to 400... well with the proliferation of ABM systems I rather doubt anything below 1,500 will be contemplated by the Russians till they can get their conventional forces up to the standard they want.

Exactly... who in their right mind would make agreements regarding how many guns you can have and how many bullets you can have in each magazine when there is no restriction on body armour or helmets.

Strategic ABM and Strategic defence both have Strategic in them... this is a Strategic Arms treaty.

Russia could simply make thousands and thousands of large heavy missiles with nuclear warheads and call them ABMs and use them as IRBMs if they really wanted to and there is no treaty or agreement that would allow the US to inspect them to verify they are not simply IRBMs because there is no treaty that covers ABMs.

Of course if rumours are true that the S-500 will be a 600km range 250km+ altitude ABM system that can be attached to a S-400 or S-300 battery then I think the US might want ABM systems limitations included too as a naval version of the system would be very powerful and a threat to low flying recon satellites world wide.

NATO already has lots of radars looking into Russian airspace, the baltic countries have some fairly large very long range NATO radars to "protect their airspace" that can look deep into Russia, and of course they have a fully constellation of satellites for early warning and preliminary trajectory information.

The new Start treaty has a clause that pretty much states that the Russians can withdraw from the treaty if it feels that US ABM systems undermine the deterrence of Russias nuclear arsenal.

I very much suspect a likely Russian move would be a mirror of the US move to withdraw from the ABM treaty, and will likely involve a withdrawl from the INF treaty with the Russians developing a range of missiles to point specifically at Europe and China and Japan so that their strategic missiles will not be vulnerable to a European based ABM system because they will all be aimed over the north pole.

The US will complain that the INF treaty is needed for this that and several other reasons, like the Russians said the ABM treaty was a basis for the SALT and START treaties.

In such a situation either the US and NATO will decide it makes sense to cooperate with Russia properly or intermediate range BMs will return.

The Russians aren't worried that the US will base an ABM system that will wipe out their entire ICBM fleet at launch.

The Russians know that ABM systems are completely unregulated so when one pops up in Europe... but it is OK because they are spending trillions of dollars to stop ICBMs that Iran doesn't have... that Japan will think they will need a similar system to protect them from NK missiles and then another system pops up in Japan and of course all the money spent on these systems will develop new technologies that can be built in the US too. All of a sudden there are three ABM systems all around Russia... by then it will be too late to object.

The simple matter of reality is that START is an agreement between Russia and the US that does not include NATO or China or Japan or South Korea etc etc. The US has the conventional forces to deal with any real threat to the US but Russia does not actually currently have that luxury.

The result is that an attack on the US would require an attack on Europe... particularly France and the UKs nuclear weapons and most likely the US bases in Europe... especially those with tactical nuclear weapons.

An ABM system in Europe that is designed to stop Iranian missiles that don't exist can certainly be used to stop the 5-10 missiles directed at US assets in Europe. It wont be intercepting them on their way over the North Pole headed for the US, it will intercept them over Poland and the Ukraine and Eastern Europe on their way to the UK and France.

For the same reasons if Russia is launching nuclear missiles at the US it will be expecting to be wiped out by the reply so it will likely also target countries like Japan and China to ensure the "love" is shared to all those countries that supported Russias enemies or acted like Russias enemy.

...no point in destroying the US several times over if the conventional forces of China and Europe then march in and take over the ashes of Russia.