Lithuania will seek that NATO member countries agree at July's summit in Vilnius to spend at least two percent of their GDP on defence, according to a presidential adviser.
“One of Lithuania’s objectives is that the NATO summit agree on and confirm the so-called Vilnius commitment on defence investment of at least two percent,” Kęstutis Budrys, the chief national security adviser to President Gitanas Nausėda, said on LRT TV on Tuesday.
NATO’s eastern flank nations are committed to spending a higher share of their GDP on defence, but other countries fail to reach even the 2-percent threshold, according to Budrys.
His comment came after NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the German news agency DPA that member countries would discuss their defence spending targets in the coming months.
“Some allies are strongly in favour of turning the current two percent target into a minimum,” he said in an interview published on Tuesday.
Stoltenberg said he aimed to reach an agreement no later than NATO’s next summit in Vilnius on July 11-12.
At NATO’s gathering in Wales in 2014, the alliance’s member states agreed to aim for spending two percent of GDP on defence by 2024.
The Lithuanian government’s 2023 budget allows raising defence spending up to 3 percent of GDP through borrowed funds, provided that the overall general government deficit for the year does not exceed 4.9 percent.
The country’s defence spending was set at 2.52 percent of GDP in 2022.
Newsletter
Every Friday morning.
