Lithuania will do everything it can to keep US troops in the country, Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas said on Tuesday.
“There’s no need to flinch every time we hear a sharp statement. We’ll make every effort to prevent the withdrawal of US troops from Lithuania,” he told reporters.
The Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman, citing unnamed sources, wrote on Monday that “European officials believe that Trump will most likely agree to withdraw US troops from the Baltic states and possibly further west, as a result of which The EU will become vulnerable to the Russian army”.
Russia has repeatedly voiced its discontent over NATO’s presence in central and eastern Europe. Before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, Moscow demanded that NATO withdraw troops from several Eastern European countries.
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth last week warned NATO allies in Europe against assuming that the American troop presence on the continent would “last forever” and urged them to spend more on defence.
US President Donald Trump has said that NATO member countries should increase their defence spending threshold from the current 2 percent to 5 percent of GDP.
Lithuanian Defence Minister Dovilė Šakalienė on Monday announced plans to visit Washington in early March. She said Lithuania is ready if the United States decides to deploy additional ground or air forces to the country.
A US rotational battalion has been stationed in Pabradė, near Vilnius, since 2019.
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