“Strengthening the Bundeswehr is the top priority in our own policy. In future, the German government will provide all the financial resources that the Bundeswehr needs to become the strongest conventional army in Europe,” new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in his parliamentary address on May 16. There is the special extra-budgetary fund for rearmament in the range of €400 billion made available for that, but inner-government discussions are going beyond that, as indicated by German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul who called for the regular defense budget to be more than tripled, from €62 to €225 billion annually. A good part of that money is going to be carved out of all other budgets except the defense one, as indicated by Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil when calling for cuts in all budgets.
Meant as a signal in the direction of Moscow, Merz announced May 16 that on May 22, he and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius will travel to the official roll call of the Bundeswehr brigade in Lithuania. Both will take part in the formal ceremony at Panzerbrigade 45 in the capital Vilnius. Deputy government spokesman Steffen Meyer spoke of an, “important milestone on the way to the permanent stationing of a German brigade on NATO’s eastern flank.”
Around 4,800 Bundeswehr soldiers and 200 civilian employees are to be stationed in the Baltic state in the Lithuanian heavy combat brigade by 2027, stationed only a few kilometers from the border with Russia. With the appointment on May 15, Panzerbrigade 45 will become “a fully-fledged brigade of the German Army,” said a spokesperson for the Federal Ministry of Defense. It will then also be given the nickname “Lithuania.”
Whereas Merz, in an television show May 15, made an attempt to play down, for the moment, the importance of the discussion about a delivery of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine, news from London the same day indicated that there may be worse things on the agenda than the Taurus. The so-called Trinity House agreement signed on October 23, 2024, under German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, will be realized now under Chancellor Merz. The project deserving special attention is the joint development of a precision missile with a range of more than 2000 km—that is four times the range of the Taurus.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and British Defense Secretary John Healey presented the new long-range weapons project at a meeting in Berlin May 15. Healey took the opportunity of claiming that the military industry was an engine of growth, creating jobs, promoting skills and driving investment in the U.K. and Germany. The bilateral nature of the Trinity House agreement shows the crucial role of the British in building up a militarized Germany into a fist against Russia.
