An elite Italian army unit has invaded Sweden.
It was all a mistake – it should have invaded Norway.
The weekend misadventure of the 116 mountain troops in their feathered Alpine caps embarrassed authorities in Rome, who are trying to change the comic-opera reputation of the Italian military.
The elite Alpini soldiers were on a NATO training mission and were supposed to fly to Kristiansand on Norway’s south coast for military exercises.
But their chartered flight on a civilian airline did not follow “the usual military procedures,” the Italian Defense Ministry said. It flew, instead, to Kristianstad, a city near Sweden’s southern Baltic coast.
“It does not seem to have occurred to anyone in the unit that Sweden is not a party of NATO,” the prominent Italian daily Corriere della Sera wrote dryly of the debacle.
“Kristiansand and Kristianstad may sound remarkably similar,” it added, “but that is no excuse for Italy invading Sweden in error.”
Once the error was discovered, the troops were rerouted to Norway, and took part in the exercises as planned.