Croatian government on Thursday approved the sending of Croatian troops outside of the country, including 70 soldiers for Nato's Enhanced Forward Presence force in Hungary in 2022 and 2023.

In a cabinet meeting, Defense Minister, Mario Banozic, said that the meeting of Nato defense ministers on February 16-17 February meeting of NATO defence ministers and the extraordinary summit of the alliance on  February 25 has “established that the current security situation in east Europe posed one of the most serious threats to the European security in the recent decades,” state agency Hina reported.

He said that the alliance decided to form additional battle groups in southeast Europe, and that Croatia agreed to deploy up to 70 soldiers for a new battle group which will be based in Hungary.

The Enhanced Forward Presence program was established in 2016 in response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, and up until now involved four battle groups based in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Croatia already takes part in the US-led battalion based in the Polish town of Orsysz.

The government also endorsed a decision to send five members of the Croatian Armed Forces to join the European Union’s Cyber Rapid Response Teams, which is a program designed to help EU countries build cyber resilience and combat cyber threats and provide protection to EU institutions.

The project is led by Lithuania, with five other EU countries (Estonia, Croatia, Netherlands, Poland, and Romania) contributing with manpower and resources.