Pasewalk/Vilnius (dpa/mv) - On Thursday (6:00 p.m.) in Pasewalk (West Pomerania-Greifswald), the Bundeswehr greeted around 250 soldiers who had been deployed in Lithuania with a ceremonial roll call. The 250 men and women from Panzergrenadier Battalion 401 near Pasewalk have been helping to secure NATO's eastern flank there since February. They are the first forces of Panzergrenadierbrigade 41 Vorpommern, which had been in Lithuania at the time of the Russian attack on Ukraine and are now returning from there. The defense commissioner of the German Bundestag, SPD politician Eva Högl, is also expected to attend the appeal.
Lithuania borders Russia's Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad and Russia's ally Belarus. The Baltic state is a NATO member and has been home to a NATO battalion since 2017, which currently has around 1,600 soldiers and is led by the Bundeswehr.
The Panzergrenadierbrigade 41, which regularly secures missions abroad, includes around 4,500 military personnel in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Schleswig-Holstein and Saxony-Anhalt. At the beginning of September, almost 100 more soldiers from three units of Brigade 41 traveled to Lithuania with equipment.
