Lithuania just agreed to drop its nuclear ban. Here is what it actually means.

Yesterday @Reuters dropped a headline - "Lithuania agrees to remove constitutional ban on nuclear weapons."

My feed split in two within an hour. Half panic, half pride 🤷‍♂️. Both sides read the headline and not much else because I live here I run my companies from here and I have my family living here. On another note - my clients are mostly from North Europeen countries.. So let me explain this the way I would explain it to a friend over coffee.

Written by me, AI gave some facts and corrected the whole text:)

First, what actually happened.

In 1992 we wrote a rule into our Constitution. Article 137. No weapons of mass destruction on our soil, no foreign military bases. Back then it had one job. Keep Russian weapons and Russian soldiers out. We had just escaped the Soviet Union. It made total sense.

Now flip it 34 years forward. The threat is the same neighbour. But the rule works backwards. Today Article 137 legally blocks the thing that protects us. Our allies. A German brigade is already stationed here. Finland dropped their similar ban a few weeks ago. So on July 2 basically all our party leaders agreed. The article is outdated, remove it.

That is the whole story. Not "nukes are coming to Vilnius".

Some plain facts, because the comment sections are wild right now.

Nothing is law yet. It needs two votes in the Seimas, two thirds majority, minimum three months between them. Realistically this finishes in 2027.

Nobody is planning to store nuclear weapons here. The president said it directly. And we stay in the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

This just removes a self made handicap. Almost every NATO country can host allied deterrence if it ever comes to that. We could not. Now we can. That is it.

What it means for regular Lithuanians. Honestly, in daily life, nothing changes. No new rules, nothing to sign, nothing to do. What changes is the emotion. We stop being the one NATO member with a hole in our own defense. A country is harder to attack when the attacker knows the full alliance stands behind it, weapons included.

What it means for business owners. This is the part I actually care the most.

Every time I travel or I'm on a meeting with clients they will always ask me - Is Lithuania safe? Should we worry about working with a Baltic company? I used to give a long answer. Now the answer is short. We tripled defense spending since 2022. A German brigade lives here. Rheinmetall is building an ammunition factory here. which means - the last constitutional grey zone is gone. Serious money does not build factories in a country it expects to lose.

Also, the defense economy is becoming a real market. Construction, logistics, IT, cyber, dual use tech. That procurement pipeline will run for a decade. If your company can serve any piece of it, start learning how it works now.

The cost side is real too. We pay for this build up through taxes and we will keep paying. I dont love it but I understand it. Insurance is never free:)

Here is the honest part. For 30 years the Baltic story was written by other people. Small. Exposed. Risky. That framing costs us capital, talent and deals every single year. Decisions like this one rewrite the story. Not because of the weapons. Because of what near unanimous consensus signals. A country that takes its own security seriously is a country you can build in.