Lithuania welcomes firefighters and medics returning from missions

LRT reported that Lithuania will welcome firefighters returning from a wildfire operation in France and medics returning from training in Ukraine on Sunday.

Forty Lithuanian firefighters will be welcomed at the Firefighters Rescue School in Vilnius District after spending almost two weeks helping fight forest fires in southern France.

The team worked in the Bordeaux and Marseille regions alongside French and other countries’ forces. They surveyed burned areas, extinguished smouldering hotspots and helped prevent fires from reigniting.

The forest fires in southern France forced the evacuation of 220,000 people, destroyed more than 200 homes and damaged an area of 42,000 hectares.

A group of medics who took part in an internship in Ukraine will also return to Lithuania on Sunday. The programme was the first joint internship for medics from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to be held in a country at war.

Over two weeks, the medics learned from Ukrainian colleagues working in real wartime conditions how to respond to mass casualties and war injuries, organise patient evacuations and maintain hospital operations under constant threat.