By Milda Seputyte and Natalia Ojewska | Bloomberg
Four US soldiers and a vehicle went missing in eastern Lithuania, where authorities have been carrying out a search-and-rescue operation since Tuesday.
The Baltic nation’s armed forces said no deaths had been confirmed as the rescue effort continued. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte had earlier signaled that the service members had died, but a spokesperson for the alliance said he was referring to news reports and apologized for any confusion.
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Rutte “was not confirming the fate of the missing, which is still unknown,” the spokesperson, Allison Hart, wrote in a post on the X social media platform.
“At the moment, there is no evidence or information confirming the death of the troops,” the Lithuanian military said in a post on X on Wednesday.
The military personnel had been conducting exercises at a training site in Pabrade in eastern Lithuania near the border with Belarus when they went missing, the Baltic nation’s military said in a statement earlier. A possible location had been determined, it said.
The US military confirmed the search, saying the soldiers from the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, were undertaking tactical training, the US Army said in a statement.
“I would like to personally thank the Lithuanian Armed Forces and first responders who quickly came to our aid in our search operations,” Lieutenant General Charles Costanza, commanding general for V Corps, said in the statement.
Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors have become a focal point of NATO efforts to bolster defenses on its eastern flank with Russia. The military alliance’s Baltic member states have all pledged increased military spending in an effort to arm the region against aggression from Moscow.
Pabrade is an extensive military training site that hosts about 1,000 US troops deployed on rotation in Lithuania. The training area is some 17,000 hectares is just miles from the border of Belarus.
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