July 9, 2026, 10:18 amJuly 9, 2026, 10:18 am
Germany agreed with the USA at the NATO summit in Ankara to purchase Tomahawk cruise missiles. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this during a government statement in the Bundestag in Berlin.
A Tomahawk cruise missile is fired.Image: EPA/DOD
“We also agreed with the American government on the sidelines of the NATO meeting in Ankara that we would acquire American Tomahawk missiles and station them in Germany,” he said. “We are thus closing an important strategic gap in our defense. And at the same time we will work on developing our own European systems and stationing them in Europe.”
Berlin wants to close a gap in its military capabilities by procuring the cruise missiles, which have a range of up to 2,500 kilometers.
At the NATO summit in 2024, the USA under President Joe Biden announced the prospect of stationing Tomahawk as well as SM-6 missiles and newly developed hypersonic weapons in Germany in 2026. The project was recently rejected under US President Donald Trump. Buying Tomahawk is now an alternative to this.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.Image: keystone
The declared goal: to deter Russia
The German Ministry of Defense declared in 2024 that it wanted to counter the Russian threat with the Tomahawk cruise missiles from 2026 onwards with effective deterrence and defense capabilities.
“Russia has stationed nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in the Kaliningrad exclave. In addition, Moscow has been deploying Russian fighter jets with Kinschal air-to-surface hypersonic missiles there since 2022. “Russia has also announced that it will station nuclear weapons in Belarus,” the Defense Ministry said at the time. And: “Since Russia is massively threatening Western Europe – the missiles have ranges of up to 2,000 kilometers – NATO has to do something about it.”
The European NATO states currently do not have their own medium-range weapons. In the medium term, several allies want to procure their own weapon system for long-range precision attacks (“deep precision strikes”) on so-called high-value targets of an opponent. To this end, the Elsa (“European Long-Range Strike Approach”) project was launched at the NATO summit in Washington in 2024.
Several European NATO allies want to develop their own cruise missile with a range of more than 2,000 kilometers under this common umbrella. Last year, the German Defense Ministry said work had begun on this new long-range weapons capability.
INF Treaty was terminated in 2019
The INF Treaty, signed in 1987 by then Kremlin chief Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan, stipulated the abolition of all land-based ballistic and cruise missiles with a shorter range of 500 to 1,000 kilometers and with an intermediate range of 1,000 to 5,500 kilometers.
The USA and European NATO countries accused Russia of violating the INF Treaty by developing a new land-based, nuclear-capable medium-range cruise missile of the type 9M729 (NATO codename: SSC-8) and equipping the Russian armed forces with it. In 2019, the USA then withdrew from the INF Treaty. (dab/sda/dpa)