{"id":131493,"date":"2025-05-25T20:13:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T20:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/131493\/"},"modified":"2025-05-25T20:13:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-25T20:13:08","slug":"a-sea-change-to-the-east-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/131493\/","title":{"rendered":"a sea change to the east \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/world\/europe\/2025\/05\/22\/merz-vows-to-defend-nato-territory-as-german-troops-deploy-in-lithuania\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/world\/europe\/2025\/05\/22\/merz-vows-to-defend-nato-territory-as-german-troops-deploy-in-lithuania\/\">German chancellor Friedrich Merz <\/a>told the cheering crowd in Lithuania\u2019s capital last week that \u201cProtecting Vilnius is protecting Berlin.\u201d Inaugurating the first permanent deployment of Germany\u2019s military on foreign soil since the second World War, Merz pledged to help defend \u201cevery inch\u201d of Nato.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall\">Vladimir Putin\u2019s 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\u2019s historic reluctance to re-arm and deploy abroad.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall\">Today the UK has 900 soldiers stationed in Estonia and Canada, has 1,900 in Latvia. Germany\u2019s will in time be the biggest of the ramped up Nato deployments in the Baltic states.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall\">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 \u20ac1.5 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 \u201cSuwalki Gap\u201d, the only land link between the Baltic states and the rest of the EU.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall\">The German deployment is a major manifestation of former Chancellor Olaf Shulz\u2019s radically new defence strategy, Zeitenwende \u2013 or \u201csea change\u201d\u2013 in response to the 2002 invasion of Ukraine. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/world\/europe\/2025\/05\/14\/merz-vows-to-build-the-strongest-army-in-europe-and-revitalise-germanys-fortunes\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/world\/europe\/2025\/05\/14\/merz-vows-to-build-the-strongest-army-in-europe-and-revitalise-germanys-fortunes\/\">Merz has taken it on board with enthusiasm<\/a>, backing Nato\u2019s five per cent of GDP defence spending target and pledging to spend up to \u20ac100 billion on re-equipping his country\u2019s neglected armed forces.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall\">The Bundeswehr marching through Vilnius, no less than the speedy accessions of Finland and Sweden to Nato, are the real fruit of Putin\u2019s bloody, misguided, and deeply counterproductive bid to curtail Nato\u2019s reach. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"German chancellor Friedrich Merz told the cheering crowd in Lithuania\u2019s capital last week that \u201cProtecting Vilnius is protecting&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131494,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[27765,5293,2000,299,1824,44888],"class_list":{"0":"post-131493","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-army","9":"tag-diplomacy","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-horizontal"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114570304289455327","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}