A unit like the one being sent to Lithuania — called Panzerbrigade 42 — costs between €25 million and €30 million a month to maintain in Germany | Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is prompting Germany to do something unprecedented — to permanently base thousands of troops only about 100 kilometers from the border with Russia and right in the line of fire if the Kremlin ever launches an attack on NATO territory.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius was in Vilnius on Monday to sign a deal with his Lithuanian counterpart Arvydas Anušauskas firming up the conditions on which 4,800 German troops plus 200 civilians will be based in the Baltic country.
"With this war-ready brigade, we are assuming a leadership responsibility here in the alliance and on NATO's eastern flank," Pistorius said, adding: "The speed of the project clearly shows that Germany understood the new security reality.”
The war in Ukraine has upended military thinking in Berlin — pressing generals and politicians to move with unaccustomed speed.
In a sign of the escalating demands on the Bundeswehr, one of the units making up the new brigade is Panzerbatallion 203 from Augustdorf in North Rhine-Westphalia, but that armored unit has handed all of its Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine and is waiting for newly built replacements.
Pistorius said that the order for replacement tanks for the 203rd is in — and once built, they'll be shipped directly to Lithuania.
But without an adequate long-term funding plan and without their main Leopard 2 combat systems, the Lithuania brigade "won't even be ready for defense," warned Roderich Kiesewetter, a politician with the opposition Christian Democrats and a retired colonel in the Bundeswehr with 27 years of service.
"The conclusion is that either [Leopard 2] replenishment is accelerated" before deployment, Aylin Matlé, a fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, said, or Panzerbattalion 203 could be sent to Lithuania "without their main battle system."
There are also worries about how the deployment fits with Germany's strained public finances.
Pistorious said a unit like the one being sent to Lithuania — called Panzerbrigade 42 — costs between €25 million and €30 million a month to maintain in Germany. The first elements will deploy next year and the full brigade is supposed to be in place by 2027.
Lithuania will build the physical infrastructure for the bases, spending about 0.3 percent of its GDP over the next years, Laurynas Kasčiūnas, head of the Lithuanian parliament's national security and defense committee, told reporters.
For now, the Bundeswehr can rely at least in part on a one-off €100 billion special fund to supplement the regular defense budget. Still, Kiesewetter said he's worried about the money "running dry" sooner than anticipated because of inflation eating into the fund.
"We will have to clarify from 2027, when the special fund has been used up, how the 2 percent [NATO spending target] will be achieved," Pistorius said. "Sustainability is the decisive factor if we want to remain capable of deterrence and defense in a few years' time, which we must be."
Firepower
But whatever the equipment and money worries, Berlin is committed to the deployment, which the German government calls a "lighthouse project," signaling its willingness to protect NATO allies and to transforming the Bundeswehr into a "war ready" force.
“The eastern flank has now moved to the east, and it’s the duty of Germany to protect it,” Pistorius said.
Germany's current Lithuania deployment is one of eight rotational enhanced Forward Presence battlegroups set up by NATO in countries along its eastern frontier; Germany is the lead nation in Lithuania, with Belgium, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and the U.S. also contributing troops.
The new unit will be based at two locations — Rukla near Lithuania's second city of Kaunas and Rūdninkai near the capital Vilnius.
Those bases put the German units very close to the Suwałki Gap — a narrow choke point linking Russia's Kaliningrad exclave and its close ally Belarus that Western military planners warn would likely be one of Russia's first targets were Vladimir Putin choose to escalate the war in Ukraine into a confrontation with NATO.
“We should expect not only good scenarios but also the very worst scenarios. So we must be ready … Russia remains the main threat to us and NATO,” Lithuanian Minister Anušauskas said.