The Adaptive Hussars 2023 international military exercise has concluded successfully, the defence ministry of said on Thursday.
Some 6,000 military personnel, including some 500 reservists, and 47 military organisations participated in the exercise of a scale and complexity not seen in Hungary for thirty years, Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, the defence minister, said in a statement.
The purpose of the exercise was to test how the Hungarian armed forces reacted to unpredictable situations, he said. As part of the international exercise, fighter jets were deployed to Sarmellek air base from Kecskemét in a simulated action, the minister said.
“Here, the soldiers tested how they could ensure fuel supply as the most important logistics task in the event of a possible terror threat,” he added.
Szalay-Bobrovniczky said they had successfully integrated NATO forces stationed in Hungary into their defence operations and received the NATO forces assigned to Hungary’s defence, organising defence manoeuvres with their cooperation.
DefMin pays tribute to world wars soldiers at re-burial
Attending the re-burial ceremony of Hungarian WW1 and WW2 soldiers at the Fiumei Street Cemetery on Wednesday, the defence minister said that “we understand the fate of those soldiers who were our predecessors and we hold them in high esteem for their sacrifice.”
“By bidding a last farewell to the soldiers and paying them a belated honour, we are sending them the message that they had died for their country that had in the end become our homeland,” Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky said. “Many of them have now found the peace they deserve after a century, some after eight decades as lost heroes and forgotten victims of a terrible war,” the minister said, adding that a war ended only once “everybody is accounted for, and can return to a due place in the remembrance of the nation”.
He noted that experts of the Military History Institute and Museum had completed the exhumation of 460 fallen soldiers in the country’s entire territory in 2023. “This year, 118 heroes of the first and second world wars have been laid to eternal rest in the Fiumei Street Cemetery, 60 of whom have been identified so far,” he said.
At the ceremony, Roland Maruzs, the deputy commander of the museum, said that out of the 460 soldiers exhumed 396 were Hungarian, 37 German, 15 Soviet, 3 Romanian while in the case of 9, the nationality of the army unit they had served in could not be established. The remains of the foreign soldiers have been turned over to the partner organisations, he said.
At the ceremony, Colonel Istvan Kindl, who died on Sept 21 in 1944 near Arad, was laid to rest, along with four other soldiers who fell in the first world war.