Germany stations eavesdropping troops in Lithuania to watch Russia

Germany is deploying a permanent electronic warfare brigade in Lithuania to monitor Russian and Belarusian military activity, the head of the German military’s cyber structure said.

The brigade, set to be fully operational next year, will track movements in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave and neighboring Belarus, Vice Admiral Thomas Daum told Reuters. It will also collect data on Russian and Belarusian military radars and emitters to update electronic warfare databases used by German and allied forces. “If something happens, these units will identify it,” Daum said. “We will feed it into the electronic warfare databases, which will then inform all our systems if there is a new radar on the Belarusian side.”

Daum described Russia’s activities in parts of Europe as entering a “second phase, where the intention is to cause harm,” short of armed conflict. “The cyber-information domain is not yet at war, but it is no longer at peace,” he added. A prior phase focused on covert network penetration and establishing positions within Western systems, he said.

The German cabinet approved measures in August, pending parliamentary approval, to grant intelligence services new powers to disrupt foreign adversaries’ communications and operations. These aim to counter what officials call a growing threat from cyber and hybrid attacks.

The Bundeswehr is currently testing electronic warfare systems in Lithuania, including drone detection tools, signal interceptors, jammers, and sensors designed to relay battlefield data to remote analysts. Patrick Jeschke, head of the Bundeswehr’s cyber innovation center, said the army previously struggled to persuade commercial firms to supply such systems before the Ukraine war. Now, the challenge has shifted from finding suppliers to selecting the most promising technologies from a flood of proposals.

Daum acknowledged that Germany had underinvested in new capabilities for decades, relying on existing equipment while focusing on overseas missions in Afghanistan and elsewhere. “Now we need to improve our capabilities,” he said.