Denmark will on Thursday announce deals to acquire long-range precision missiles for the first time in its history, Danish public broadcaster TV2 reported, citing anonymous sources, in a story carried by Reuters. The announcement has not yet been made officially, and TV2 did not name the suppliers or the value of the deals in the report.
Source: Reuters via Devdiscourse
The move is the next step in a shift Copenhagen announced last year, when the Danish government said it intended to buy long-range offensive weapons to counter a Russian military threat to Europe — a plan that drew sharp condemnation from Moscow at the time, Reuters reported.
Announcing that decision, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called it a paradigm shift in Danish defence policy. "For the first time, Denmark is to build up military capacity in the form of long-range precision weapons," she said, adding that Russia would remain a threat to Denmark and Europe "for years to come" and that the weapons could hit targets at long range and neutralise enemy missile threats.
Source: CommonSpace
Russia's ambassador to Copenhagen, Vladimir Barbin, called the Danish justification at the time "pure madness" and said Moscow would take the statements into account — remarks Frederiksen said should be read as a threat, adding that Denmark would not be intimidated.
The expected announcement comes in the same week that Norway's Kongsberg announced Denmark had ordered additional Naval Strike Missiles worth about NOK 400 million — yaani 40 crore Norwegian kroner — for its coastal defence system, under a government-to-government deal between Norway and Denmark, the company said. Neither Kongsberg nor the Danish procurement agency disclosed how many missiles that order covers.
Denmark guards the Baltic Sea exits and Greenland's approaches. A first-ever long-range strike capability marks how far NATO's northern flank has moved since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine — and Moscow has already signalled it is watching Copenhagen's build-up closely.