Lithuania to lift constitutional ban on nuclear weapons and foreign military bases

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Lithuania’s parliamentary parties have agreed on a plan to lift a constitutional ban on nuclear weapons and foreign military bases in the Baltic nation, the president said, in a sign of how Russia is resetting security calculations in the region.

The move — a major legal overhaul which will need two-thirds majorities in two parliamentary votes to go through — would remove prohibitions put in place more than three decades ago after Lithuania broke away from the Soviet Union.

“The geopolitical situation is getting worse,” President Gitanas Nauseda told reporters after meeting with parliament party leaders on Thursday.

“Our constitution was written when geopolitical circumstances were totally different.”

Lithuania — a NATO member which shares land borders with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and with Moscow’s ally Belarus — has tripled its defence spending since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

It is upgrading its armed forces, fortifying its borders and building the infrastructure for the combat-ready German brigade which will be permanently based there in 2027, to deter Russia from attacking.

The announcement comes four months after NATO ally Finland, which also borders Russia, announced plans to repeal a decades-old legal ban on nuclear weapons.

That move was made in the wake of Helsinki’s decision to join NATO in 2023, a historic shift in reaction to the Ukraine war.

Lithuania’s constitutional ban on nuclear weapons is probably the strictest of its kind among NATO allies, and was put in place before it joined NATO, Linas Kojala, head of Vilnius’s Geopolitics and Security Studies Center, told Reuters.

“There is a broad consensus that such a restriction ... does not correspond to the current geopolitical situation, in which the nuclear weapons of the Allies are an essential element of deterrence,” Kojala added.

“Therefore, it is important that there are no obstacles to strengthening the element of deterrence.”

President Nauseda said there were no immediate plans to store nuclear weapons in Lithuania, but that removing the provision would let the country take action if the security situation changed.

Lithuania will remain a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Nauseda said.

Parliament Speaker Juozas Olekas told reporters the amendments could be adopted by the end of this year.