Dear colleagues, students and friends, dear Linas Kojala.
Europe must, for the first time in three generations, seriously contemplate the defense of its own territory, the security of its own neighbourhood, and the credibility of its own deterrent, without betting that the cavalry will come from somewhere else.
I know here in Vilnius, this is not news. For most of Western Europe, the last thirty years felt like peace. But you know better. In January 1991, Soviet troops stormed the television tower in this city, and fourteen people died defending your freedom. The rest of Europe is learning what you have always known.
Let me say something personal before I go further. I have never been, and I will never be, what we in Germany call a Moskauversteherin – someone who “understands” Moscow. I have not come to Vilnius to explain the Kremlin. I have come to stand with you. Solidarity with the Baltic states and with Central and Eastern Europe is not a favour Germany grants. It is our responsibility.
Europe is alone. But you are not!
The first Trump administration's approach to NATO — the suggestion that Article 5 might be conditional — cracked the psychological foundation of the Alliance even as the institutional architecture held. The Russian invasion of Ukraine showed that a major land war in Europe is not just a nightmare but the new reality.
Now, the defense of Europe depends, in part, on the mood of one man in Washington, who lifts sanctions on Russian diesel exports over the heads of the Ukrainians.
So what is our European response?
I. Four questions
In March 2025, the European Commission proposed mobilising up to €800 billion for defense – this would be the largest commitment to our collective defense in seventy years. But so far it is a number, not a budget – and we still have no doctrine.
A European security and defense strategy needs to answer four questions. Against whom are we defending ourselves? With what means? Through what command structure? And to what political end?
I am not aware of any European government, including my own, having given a clear, comprehensive public answer.
Today let me give you mine, one by one – a European Defense Union- and what this means.
I want to begin here, in Lithuania.
II. Against whom – what Lithuania already knows
Russia is the most serious and immediate threat to the European security order, and will remain so for at least a generation. But not only Russia: we are threatened by anyone who uses coercion, sabotage and disinformation to divide us.
I am very grateful to speak here this afternoon. Your country shows how it stands up to the threats it faces right at its border. When I came to Vilnius today, I saw the Ukrainian flags everywhere. I saw the words “Vilnius loves Ukraine“ on your buses.
I learned about the Elves movement, which fights disinformation together with the media, the government and the education sector. In a world where fathers don’t speak with their daughters and sisters don’t speak with their brothers, it is all we have: to act united against those who want to see us divided.
And security is not just about Moscow. In 2021, when Lithuania allowed a Taiwanese Representative Office to open here in Vilnius, Beijing answered with a trade blockade – and with pressure on European companies, German ones included, to cut Lithuanian suppliers out of their supply chains. The message was: you are small, you are alone, give in. I remember it well, because my very first trip as a member of the German government, from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, brought me here: to show our solidarity clearly, and to talk to the companies under pressure. Out of that experience, we pushed for a European answer – the Anti-Coercion Instrument. At the time, there was no majority in the German government to give it its sharpest edge: real power for the Commission to act fast. I am glad that Berlin and Paris are now proposing exactly that. The lesson is simple. Whoever coerces one of us, coerces all of us. We stand together – always, not only when it is convenient.
So Germany has much to learn from you. Resilience – a society that knows what to do when the lights go out. Clarity – calling things by their name. And readiness – not as panic, but as civic duty. When cables are cut in the Baltic Sea, when GPS signals are jammed, when parcels catch fire in logistics centres, when people are pushed across your border by the Lukashenko regime – you do not speak of unfortunate incidents. You call it what it is: a shadow war. Accepting that it is war is the first step towards winning it. In Germany, we are still too often debating whether it is happening at all.
III. With what means
A number is just a number, and money is not yet capability. You cannot will artillery shells into existence by appropriating funds for them. Our means must be European – and they must truly be ours.
At the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we learned that we had the tanks, but lacked the infrastructure to get them to the front. Lithuania is expected to make military mobility a priority during its 2027 Presidency of the Council of the EU.
And we must be clear-eyed about what a European Defense Union has to deliver.
The European Defense Union will be a sovereignty project across the entire modern military power spectrum: sovereign cloud infrastructure, our own AI capability for defense applications, and a sustained effort to reduce European dependence on imported rare earths and critical minerals.
Without this digital and industrial backbone, every shell we produce, every aircraft we deploy will still depend on infrastructure controlled elsewhere. That is not strategic autonomy. That is autonomy on someone else's terms.
Things are moving in the right direction — and you Lithuania show us how. In Baisogala, Rheinmetall and the Lithuanian state are building an artillery ammunition plant in a joint venture. Government and industry, Germany and Lithuania, side by side.
Between Germany and Poland, we are not there yet. The German-Polish defense agreement signed in June is an important step. Now it must be filled with life – because, as you know in Poland and across Eastern Europe, what counts is what actually happens.
IV. Through what command – a European Defense Union
What we can no longer have, are twenty-seven national chains of command, and a structure that depends on Washington’s mood of the day. We need to have a European structure of our own, just in case! Such a command structure could take place within a European Defense Union.
I have worked long enough in the European Parliament to know one thing: This cannot and will not become a project of all twenty-seven EU member states. What we need is a Coalition of the Brave. Not necessarily within the institutional boundaries of the European Union, but within a European framework of shared responsibility.
Within such a European Defense Union, France, Germany, Poland, Spain and Italy must lead the way. The Baltics and the Nordics bring vital frontline experience with hybrid threats. The Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom bring serious defense-industrial and naval weight.
Its first contours are most visible here in Lithuania. Here, where our German Panzerbrigade 45 is being permanently stationed, with thousands of soldiers preparing for the defense of NATO territory against a potential Russian attack.
We work together in mutual trust, making it clear that Russia would never face one country alone. This is the European strength we have started to build together, here in Lithuania, despite what happened in 1939 and during the horrible German occupation from 1941.
The elephant in the room – Germany.
The German government's declared goal, set out in its first-ever national military strategy — titled Verantwortung für Europa, Responsibility for Europe — is to have the strongest conventional army on the continent. I repeat: The strongest on the continent.
I was born on the border between Germany and France. I am a child of the Franco-German reconciliation project, and I sometimes wonder how quickly my fellow citizens “forget” the scars that German imperialism and Nazism have left all over Europe. What they have meant and still mean in Warsaw and Coventry. They mean Auschwitz. They mean Paneriai and Kaunas. The post-war German republic was constructed precisely on the recognition that this should, and could, never happen again.
My generation grew up with the survivors and the witnesses. Soon there will be no one left who can say: I was there. Passing on this history is now our task – and yours. At its centre stands the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews. Here in Lithuania, more than nine out of ten Jews were murdered. Vilnius, once called the Jerusalem of the North, lost a world. In Paneriai alone, some 70,000 Jews were shot.
But German guilt does not end there. Germany brought a war of annihilation to this continent. Warsaw was razed to the ground, Leningrad was starved, Rotterdam and Coventry were bombed. Millions of Soviet prisoners of war were left to die, millions of people were deported to Germany as forced labourers. And here in Lithuania, German occupation meant terror, plunder and murder. In June 1944, German troops burned the village of Pirčiupiai together with its inhabitants – 119 people, many of them children. Remembering all of this is not a ritual. It is the foundation of everything I am saying today.
Nie wieder.
The simplest and most powerful two words in modern German political language.
Never again.
For eighty years, these words have meant a constitutional reluctance to use force – a strategic culture so cautious that it sometimes infuriated our allies, not least here in the Baltic states, and yet a foundational achievement of the post-war order. Today, nie wieder must mean something more: that the catastrophes of the twentieth century shall never return.
In Berlin, over the past three years, we convinced ourselves that our partners have been waiting for us to step up. I think, here in Lithuania, that is very true. But isn't it also a question of who holds power in Germany today — and who will hold it in the future?
A survey published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation just last week puts numbers to this. More than 9,000 people in six EU countries were asked how they view German rearmament. Nowhere is support higher than here in Lithuania: 87 percent. But only 70 percent of Lithuanians are confident that Germany would come to their aid if they were attacked – despite our brigade. And when asked about their greatest concern, people here did not name our history first. They named the rise of extremist forces in Germany today.
The AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland currently leads in our national polls. It fell just short of an absolute majority of seats in this year’s election in Saxony-Anhalt. But the planning horizon of the new German military strategy runs until 2039. The Bundeswehr we are building today will be inherited by political coalitions we cannot yet name, in geopolitical conditions we cannot yet foresee.
German strategic culture therefore needs a new formulation – not a replacement for nie wieder, but a clarification.
Today's nie wieder means never again German exceptionalism. It must ensure that Germany, should it ever come under the control of a far-right government, is embedded in European structures so deeply that it cannot be turned against the European order itself.
It means:
Never again alone.
Nie wieder allein means that German power is never again exercised alone. All major military decisions are made in concert, within binding frameworks, together with our most important allies.
Precisely because of the crimes Germans committed in this region, one thing must be beyond doubt: German defense capability can only be European. Not a German army that happens to cooperate with Europe, but a German contribution to European defense – bound to it, and accountable to it.
Our partners are asking for exactly this. In the same survey, the largest group of respondents – 44 percent – want Europe’s defense to be led jointly by the European Union, with no single country in charge.
But Nie wieder allein has a second side – and here in Lithuania you feel it most. Almost one in three Lithuanians is not confident that Germany would stand by them if it came to the worst. That worry is legitimate, and it is our job to answer it – not with words, but with reliability. Never again alone also means: Germany will never again leave its partners alone. For us, the defense of Vilnius is the defense of Berlin. National defense and alliance defense are one and the same. I will always stand up for that.
Germany has to prove what Never again alone actually means for our nation.
V. To what end – the lonelier continent
Security and values are not two separate things. We do not defend territory for its own sake. We defend a way of life – and the values that make it possible. A Europe that is secure but no longer free would have lost what it set out to protect. A Europe that is free but cannot defend itself will not stay free for long. That is why we defend both.
Not to manage a stalemate in Ukraine, but so that Ukraine can defend its freedom and decide its own future. We support Ukraine so that borders in Europe will never again be moved by force.
As I told you, I was born on the border between Germany and France. On that border lies Neuenburg am Rhein, a small town on the Upper Rhine. A frontier town that changed hands again and again – and was razed to the ground three times: in 1675, in 1704 and in 1940. For centuries, the question of who that riverbank belonged to was answered by soldiers. Peace, for my generation, began in our heads – with the quiet certainty that this question was settled. Borders stay where they are, no matter who was there first.
That is exactly the peace order Putin is destroying. “This was once ours, so it must be ours again” is not a Russian peculiarity. It is contagious. In May, a young activist of the AfD’s youth organisation posted a smiling photo of himself with the caption: “How I look at you after you said: ‘Alsace-Lorraine must return to German possession.’” And on the Day of German Unity this year, a board member of the same organisation posted a map of Germany that included Alsace and Lorraine. Provocations, perhaps. But this is how it begins – when the inviolability of borders becomes a punchline.
At stake is peace – the European peace order itself. If borders can be moved by force in the Donbas, they will be questioned on the Rhine. That is what we are defending.
I began stating that Europe is alone. And yes, our continent has grown more lonely since the US began to question our transatlantic alliance openly.
Yet this is not a loneliness we have chosen, and it is not one we want. There is a difference between an administration and an alliance, because administrations may change.
Lithuania knows this well: you are working to keep American troops here, permanently. Europe should do everything to keep the Americans in – without remaining dependent on them. The transatlantic era as we knew it is over. What we must preserve, and stand up for every single day, are the values that bind us: free and democratic societies, based on the rule of law.
And last night, American citizens showed what that means. In the midterm elections, millions of them went to the polls – a proud and powerful statement of democratic resilience.
Our democracies – in every member state and in the European Union itself – must be defended against forces from outside and from within. Authoritarians work together remarkably well: they share money, narratives and methods, from Moscow to Beijing to those in our own societies who would gladly copy them. But they can be defeated – if democrats work together at least as well.
That means confronting their power where it is built today: in our feeds. We must change the algorithms that reward outrage and division, break the monopolies of a handful of platforms, and put clear limits on the tech bros of Silicon Valley and on Beijing’s reach through TikTok. Whoever decides what millions of people see every day holds a power that no democracy can leave unchecked.
But defending democracy is not enough. We must also renew it – nationally and in Europe. That starts with an honest question: what do we decide locally, what nationally, and what together as Europeans? Let us focus on what really matters. Let us place more trust in citizens, municipalities and businesses, and stop micromanaging every detail – and at the same time act far more firmly against the black sheep who abuse that trust. A democracy that delivers, and is seen to be fair, is the strongest defense we have.
So let me be concrete about what we defend. We defend the right to live as you choose – to love whom you love, to believe what you believe, to say what you think without fear. We defend social security: the promise that no one is left alone in illness, in old age, or when work is lost. We defend opportunity: that where you start in life does not decide where you end up, whether you grew up in Kaunas or in Chemnitz. And, not least, we defend peace – the everyday certainty that our children will grow up without war.
This is what Putin’s war is aimed at. Not only at borders, but at the very idea that people can live like this. That is what we defend.
But in this newfound loneliness also lies a hint of freedom. We now have the freedom to redefine ourselves as a continent. A loneliness felt together leads to a freedom exercised together.
Freedom, for Hannah Arendt, is not a property of the isolated individual. Freedom emerges in the space between people: in plurality, in the public realm, through what she called acting in concert. To be free is not simply to be left alone. It is to act with others, in public, on matters that concern us all.
This is what built the European Union: that pooling sovereignty between states is not a diminution of freedom but its enlargement.
Freedom only exists in the space between us. It cannot be possessed. It has to be practised.
Lithuania regained its freedom in 1990 and has fought to keep it ever since. Here, freedom and responsibility belong together – everyone knows that freedom has to be defended, and that each of us has a part in it. In Germany, I sometimes fear that connection has become buried under decades of security that others guaranteed for us. We have to dig it out again.
But Germany also has its own history of freedom, and we should remember it more often. In 1848, democrats across the German lands rose up for a constitution, for civil rights, for a nation both united and free – under black, red and gold, the colours that are our flag today. They failed, but their ideas did not. In 1989, people in Leipzig and East Berlin walked into the streets with candles, facing an armed state, and said: Wir sind das Volk – we are the people. That same summer, two million people here joined hands in the Baltic Way, from Vilnius to Tallinn. Our revolutions of freedom belong together.
One date holds all of German history: the ninth of November. In 1848, the democrat Robert Blum was executed. In 1918, the first German republic was proclaimed. In 1938, synagogues burned across Germany. In 1989, the Wall fell. Destruction and freedom, on the same day. That is why remembering can never mean choosing only the parts we like. We pass on both: the guilt and the courage.
Nie wieder allein is the guiding principle for the new German military posture.
But the principle applies to the European condition as a whole.
Never again alone — for Germany, in the exercise of military power.
Never again alone — for Europe, in the assumption that someone else will defend it.
And never again alone — for any of us, because freedom itself is not something we possess alone, but something we do with others.
For Germany, this is a commitment to Europe – not as one option among many, but as the obligation our history has placed on us.
That is the principle. That is the project. That is the work of our generation. For all of us in Europe. And for all of you, sitting in this room.
