Lithuania will spend its military funding by year end, PM assures

Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius said Thursday he had received assurances from the defence minister that all allocated defence funds would be spent properly and efficiently by the end of the year, despite about half of this year’s budget remaining unspent in mid-October.

Speaking to the Liberal Movement faction in the Seimas, Lithuania’s parliament, Sinkevičius said that while spending the money was important, procurement had to remain transparent and efficient rather than being rushed simply to meet a year-end deadline.

He said he was personally monitoring the use of defence allocations and expected most payments to be made in the final quarter of the year.

Lithuania’s 2026 defence budget stands at 4.8 billion euros, equivalent to 5.38% of GDP.

“Those percentages may not be encouraging. One would like to see more even investment in defence quarter by quarter. It appears that the largest volume of payments will be executed in the last quarter,” Sinkevičius said.

The government has introduced a tool to track how individual procurement organisations within the national defence system use investment funds, he added.

As of last week, about half of this year’s defence funding remained unspent. Deputy Defence Minister Karolis Aleksa said, however, that spending was progressing faster than it had at the same point last year.

Sinkevičius has previously said he accepted the Defence Ministry’s explanations for the delays but stressed that procurement bodies needed to work faster.

He attributed some of the difficulties to the sharp increase in defence funding. The previous conservative-led government allocated 3.5% of GDP to the military, while the current budget provides more than 5%, leaving the existing administrative system to manage the larger sums.

The prime minister also questioned whether efforts to centralise procurement had been fully implemented, noting that several dozen organisations were still involved in purchasing.

“I think that the centralisation of procurement, which was considered and carried out through the Defence Materiel Agency, I don’t know if it has been fully realised, because there are several dozen purchasing organisations,” he said.

“This means that the speed, organisation of the process, its management and monitoring face certain challenges,” he added.

Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas has submitted proposed public procurement amendments to the parliament intended to speed up military acquisitions. The proposals include new procurement categories and shorter deadlines for the Public Procurement Office to decide whether to authorise simplified purchasing procedures.

The draft government spending bill for next year allocates 5% of GDP, or more than 4.8 billion euros, to defence. The total includes funding for the Defence Ministry and more than 896 million euros for the State Defence Fund.