German chancellor Friedrich Merz told the cheering crowd in Lithuania’s capital last week that “Protecting Vilnius is protecting Berlin.” Inaugurating the first permanent deployment of Germany’s military on foreign soil since the second World War, Merz pledged to help defend “every inch” of Nato.
Vladimir Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine and his expansionist ambitions, notably aimed at countries he still regards as part of the Soviet Union, have buried any historical anti-German animus in nervous Baltic states. It has also removed Germany’s historic reluctance to re-arm and deploy abroad.
Today the UK has 900 soldiers stationed in Estonia and Canada, has 1,900 in Latvia. Germany’s will in time be the biggest of the ramped up Nato deployments in the Baltic states.
The German deployment currently numbers some 400 soldiers, to be increased by 2027 to a full 5,000, plus their families. By then the Lithuanians, at a cost close to €1.5 billion, will have built what amounts to a small town, including a school, day-care centres as well as barracks and shops, to accommodate them. The tank battalion will be stationed about 30km from the Belarusian border, its priority to safeguard the strategically critical 100 kilometre border with Poland, the “Suwalki Gap”, the only land link between the Baltic states and the rest of the EU.
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The German deployment is a major manifestation of former Chancellor Olaf Shulz’s radically new defence strategy, Zeitenwende – or “sea change”– in response to the 2002 invasion of Ukraine.
Merz has taken it on board with enthusiasm, backing Nato’s five per cent of GDP defence spending target and pledging to spend up to €100 billion on re-equipping his country’s neglected armed forces.
The Bundeswehr marching through Vilnius, no less than the speedy accessions of Finland and Sweden to Nato, are the real fruit of Putin’s bloody, misguided, and deeply counterproductive bid to curtail Nato’s reach.
