Small country, big effort. Luxembourg increases the defense budget, 16 percent of it ‘sent’ to Ukraine | iRADIO

One cargo plane, two helicopters shared with the police, 200 trucks and 900 soldiers make up the Luxembourg army. The small country between Germany, France and Belgium, which you can drive from north to south in an hour, wanted, like other European Union states, to help the attacked country after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But the Grand Duchy, home to approximately 645,000 inhabitants, i.e. the same as in Brno and Ostrava combined, does not have full warehouses of Soviet technology like the Czech Republic or Poland. It doesn’t even have a defense industry to send donations to Ukraine.

The New York Times described an original solution that the Luxembourg government came up with: shortly after the invasion, it created a two-person team to search the European and American markets for military equipment and weapons that Luxembourg could buy for Ukraine.

“In 2022, we have provided Ukraine with lethal and non-lethal equipment worth 74.4 million euros, which represents more than 16 percent of our annual defense budget,” Luxembourg Defense Minister François Bausch announced this week.

“Luxembourg has mainly sent humanitarian aid since the beginning, the country is also permanently open to immigrants. The Luxembourg army is not large. They have already donated the supplies they could have donated, so they are targeting foreign markets where they meet the Czech Republic,” explained Vladimír Bärtl, the Czech ambassador to Luxembourg, to iROZHLAS.cz.

He had in mind the purchase of Czech drones from Primoco UAV SE, which was published by Hospodářské noviny in November 2022. It doesn’t end there.

“I connected the Amos agency (agency of the Ministry of Defense for intergovernmental defense cooperation – note ed.) and the team of the Luxembourg Minister of Defense. Specialists of the Amos agency help Luxembourgers to orientate themselves in the corporate sphere in the Czech Republic so that they can buy, in addition to drones, other things that Ukraine is calling for and which may be available to the Czech Republic, or there are production capacities,” explained Bärtl.

“Our decision-making processes are much shorter than in other countries, we are flexible and we can deliver quickly. I think Luxembourg was one of the countries that was able to deliver the material the fastest in March 2022,” Colonel Guy Hoffmann, who coordinates military aid to Ukraine, told a Luxembourg newspaper.

Weapons of gold

Luxembourg is one of the twelve founding countries of the North Atlantic Alliance and is the only one of the thirty member states that spends less than one percent on defense. At the summit in Wales in 2014, member countries pledged to allocate two percent of GDP to defense.

“Luxembourg has a huge GDP, a small country and a small army. Prime Minister Xavier Bettel’s popular bon mot is that if Luxembourg were to adhere to two percent of GDP for defense, they would have to buy weapons from gold for the soldiers,” summarized Bärtl.

In 2023, Luxembourg allocated 0.71 percent of its GDP to defense, i.e. 573 million euros, which is approximately 13.5 billion crowns.

For comparison, the Czech Republic with a population of ten million and an army of 28,000 soldiers has 111 billion crowns available for defense this year.

Even so, Luxembourg plans to increase defense spending by up to one percent in 2028, which would mean less than a billion euros, i.e. approximately 24 billion crowns.

What does the second smallest country of the European Union spend on? “Given the character of Luxembourg, it will not be a massive purchase of heavy equipment. Just as the country’s civilian focus is on hi-tech (the most advanced technology – note ed.), so I think they will target investments in this area accordingly,” says Bärtl. It could be the development of Luxembourg’s cyber forces or space technologies.

And also for additional help to Ukraine, as Ambassador Bärtl adds: “I think that it is primarily about buying things that Ukraine needs, to supply Ukraine with things that they do not have themselves and for which they do not have the production capacity.”

Katerina Gruntová

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