During his visit to Lithuania, the German chancellor called on allies to significantly up their efforts to strengthen European defenses against a hostile Russia, marking Berlin’s first permanent foreign army deployment since World War II.
Friedrich Merz and his defense minister, Boris Pistorius, attended a ceremony marking the official establishment of an armored brigade to defend NATO’s eastern flank while a crowd waved Lithuanian, German, and Ukrainian flags.
There will be 200 civilian employees and 4,800 German soldiers in the new heavy combat unit, the 45th tank brigade.
It was declared in reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and by 2027, it should be fully operational.
“We are committed to defending the alliance territory against any aggression in concert with our partners,” Merz stated.
Our security is also the security of our Baltic friends. Unprecedented for the Bundeswehr, the deployment is intended to strengthen defenses against Russia in Lithuania and the Baltic republics of Estonia and Latvia, which are former Soviet states now members of NATO and the EU.
Nausėda commended Merz for Germany’s demonstration of solidarity with the new military unit established at the request of Lithuania, a country of 2.9 million people that borders Belarus, an ally of Moscow, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
“We understand the threat and believe that we can face up to the threat with our allies,” he said, adding that Lithuania aimed to meet a new NATO target of allocating 5% of its GDP to defense by the following year.
According to Merz, Germany, the largest economy in Europe, would achieve the same standard by 2032 if 3.5% of GDP were allocated to military acquisitions and 1.5% to military-related infrastructure, such as ports, highways, and bridges.
Prior to Merz’s visit, Dovilė Šakalienė, the defense minister of Lithuania, shared Pistorius’s opinion that Russia would be able to attack a NATO state in five years and told Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper how important it was to have a credible deterrent against Russia.
“Every Lithuanian knows that no one will be spared if the Russians come,” she claimed.
Source: The Guardian
