Germany has made its first permanent foreign military deployment since World War Two, sending troops to Lithuania’s eastern flank.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and defence secretary Boris Pistorius attended an inauguration ceremony for the deployment, in the company of Lithuania’s president Gitanas Nauseda, in the country’s capital city of Vilnius.
“Peace in Europe has been broken, each and every day Russia is violating the order that we collectively adopted as a lesson from the horrors of the Second World War” Merz said.
Lithuania is bordered by Latvia and Poland, as well as Russian exclave Kaliningrad to the west and Moscow’s ally Belarus to the east.
The BBC’s Berlin correspondent, Jess Parker, reports from the inaugural ceremony in Vilnius.
