Kaunas demands year-round defence procurement

Lithuania’s Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas says he will require defence procurement to be planned within a single system and carried out evenly throughout the year, LRT reports.

President Gitanas Nausėda has criticised the uneven use of defence funds, saying most procurement is completed only at the end of the year.

“The main problem is that in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, unfortunately, the pattern has been the same every year. There are very few contracts in the first quarter, slightly more in the second, a little more in the third, and then most of our payments are made in the fourth quarter,” Kaunas told the 15min news portal on Friday.

“I am demanding this even distribution from the ministry, and we have already taken initial steps so that everything is planned within a single system, which was not the case before,” he said.

Kaunas also said next year’s defence budget would be larger in euro terms than this year’s budget. Negotiations are still under way over whether it will also increase as a percentage of gross domestic product.

“I can guarantee that we will remain in the 5 percent group. There is agreement that in absolute terms, meaning the budget in euros, we will have a larger budget than this year. But how many percentage points of GDP it will be is still being negotiated,” he said.

Nausėda said this week that Lithuania needed to break the pattern of spending most of its annual defence budget at the end of the year. He called for organisational changes at the Ministry of National Defence so procurement policy would change without buying weapons indiscriminately.

Lithuania’s budget for this year allocates 5.38 percent of GDP, or about 4.8 billion euros, to defence. Data provided by the ministry to BNS in September showed that 41.4 percent of the planned budget had been used.