Lithuania Builds a EUR 40 Million Exercise Camp at Rudninkai for Over 1,000 Visiting NATO Troops
Vilnius, 20 August 2026
Key points
- Lithuania's defence ministry announced on 20 August a new exercise camp at the Rudninkai training area, near the Belarus border, costing over EUR 40 million
- The camp covers seven hectares — accommodation, service buildings and technical infrastructure — for more than 1,000 visiting German and other NATO troops attending exercises
- Completion is planned for the first half of 2028; the contract for design proposals took effect this month
- Rudninkai is the training area used by the German armoured brigade permanently stationed in Lithuania — a separate, larger infrastructure project from this exercise camp
- The ministry frames the spending as strategic and comprehensive: training conditions for both the resident brigade and rotating allied forces
Lithuania will build a EUR 40 million exercise camp at Rudninkai, near the Belarus border, to house more than 1,000 visiting NATO troops during training — a seven-hectare facility distinct from the German brigade's own permanent infrastructure on the same range, due for completion in the first half of 2028.
The design-proposal contract took effect this month, with the ministry setting a first-half-2028 completion date for accommodation, service buildings and the supporting technical and transport infrastructure. Rudninkai already hosts Germany's 45th Armoured Brigade, the standing forward-deployed formation Berlin committed to Lithuania, and the ministry's own framing ties the new camp explicitly to that presence: adequate conditions for the resident brigade and for the allied units that exercise alongside it. A separate, larger track runs at the same site: Rheinmetall's roughly EUR 250 million contract, reported by LRT on 26 August, to build a permanent modular camp for up to 2,000 of the brigade's own troops, completion targeted for August 2027. The EUR 40 million project named here is the rotational-exercise layer built alongside it, not the brigade's home base.
Rudninkai is being built for a garrison and a surge at once. A brigade housed permanently and an exercise camp built to receive over a thousand additional troops on top of it describe a site being built for standing presence and surge capacity at once, which is a different commitment than either project read alone. Großwald's Signal No. 128 logged the announcement alongside German pioneers' work on Poland's Eastern Shield the same week — two adjacent signs of the same eastern-flank infrastructure build-out. The 2028 date is the one to check: Rudninkai's construction record on prior tranches will show whether Lithuania's timelines hold.
