Rescuers have managed to pull a 70-ton armored vehicle from a deep swamp in eastern Lithuania as they keep searching for four American soldiers who went missing last week.
A painstaking multinational recovery operation has focused on getting the Hercules M88 vehicle onto dry land after it was found submerged in boggy terrain in the Pabradė military training area.
It remains unclear whether the men are onboard, and Lithuanian defense minister Dovilė Šakalienė said that any news about the missing troops would be provided by U.S. officials.
The vehicle, which had sunk into 5-meter-deep muddy waters, was recovered in the early hours of Monday.
“At 4:30 a.m., the extraction operation was completed,” Šakalienė told Lithuania’s public broadcaster, LRT. “Two M88 armored vehicles were used, along with two additional bulldozers for anchoring, as the initial setup was insufficient.”
Challenging circumstances, including persistent flooding on the site and the need to shore up the terrain for the use of heavy machinery, have complicated the recovery efforts, which have involved Lithuanian, U.S. and Polish forces.
The U.S. Army has brought in hundreds of divers, troops and engineers from other bases, along with specialist equipment. On Sunday, a special church service was held in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, to pray for the vanished soldiers.
“After 138 hours of intense, continuous work, the armored vehicle was pulled out of the swamp in Pabradė,” Lithuania’s prime minister, Gintautas Paluckas, wrote on X. “We are immensely grateful to the Lithuanian and U.S. soldiers, our other forces and volunteers who carried out this complex work. We also thank the countries that offered assistance and those who were ready to help if needed.”
Defense Minister Šakalienė said that Lithuanian Military Police and U.S. investigators were now on the scene, adding in a post on Facebook that people needed to “remain calm” during a sensitive time for the soldiers’ families.
She added: “If recovering the armored vehicle does not provide all the answers, the work will continue.”
The U.S. military has a significant presence in parts of Eastern Europe, including the Baltic states. The Pabradė base, located near Lithuania’s border with Belarus, is home to around 1,000 troops deployed on a rotational basis since 2019.
