European Commissioner for Defence Andrius Kubilius said the EU executive’s military mobility package, which enters trilogues in the European Parliament on Thursday, is necessary and should be implemented “as soon as we can be ready” – but MEPs want it implemented two years ahead of the originally envisaged deadline.
“The big problem for us is that we have 27 member states and they have 27 regimes of military mobility,” Kubilius told Euronews. “For example, to bring troops from Spain to the Baltic states, it can take something like 45 days. We are changing that very radically.”
Asked by Euronews about the proposed 2028 deadline and whether he endorses it, Kubilius said that was the point of the trilogues: to discuss proposals.
"We need to agree not only with the Parliament, we need to agree with the (European) Council. But as Commission we are really ambitious," he said.
Military mobility is the ability for tanks, troops and other military convoys to swiftly move from one side of the European continent to another in wartime, and the proposal under discussion forms part of the EU's broader Readiness 2030 defence agenda.
