Huge search for Danish soldiers who vanish close to the Russian border

Danish soldiers have failed to return from a training exercise prompting a helicopter search in Finnmark.

Police helicopters and drones, rescue dogs, the Red Cross and the Armed Forces are all now searching for the missing unit amid fears ‘something happened to them’.

Jørgen Haukland Hansen, an operations manager for Finnmark Police District, said the ten soldiers should have returned to base no later than 7am this morning.

He told Dagbladet that police were notified at 4.37pm, and they immediately sent resources to help the search.

He said: ‘One of the options is the soldiers may have misunderstood the meeting time.

‘The other is that something may have happened to them, and that is why we have now initiated a search.’

The search was initiated at 6.30pm, the operations manager said. 

Twelve hours after their supposed meeting time police confirmed half of the soldiers had been found safe.

Three returned to the meeting point, while two were located by helicopter.

Lars Strøm, head of communications for the Norwegian army, said it was a routine military exercise.

He said: ‘This can basically be considered a routine exercise among the hunter battalion at Høybuktmoen.

‘Part of their mission is to get from A to B, while being hunted.

‘Not being able to get radio contact in these difficult areas is not abnormal. At the same time, we have routines when radio contact is not achieved for a while.

‘Then we implement measures to be on the safe side and that is the process that is underway now.’

Finnmark is an area ‘where East meets West’ bordering Troms county to the west, Finland’s Lapland region to the south, and Russia’s Murmansk Oblast to the east.

In 1944, the Soviets freed eastern Finnmark from Nazi control as WWII neared an end.

But until the end of the Cold War,Russian troops patrolled the 196km closed border.

As tensions rose between Europe and Russia, the region was caught in the middle of what some dubbed a ‘spy war’.