Sled dogs are tied up on a plain overlooking the city of Ilulissat, in Greenland, on March 15, 2026. | AFP photo
Denmark and its allies deployed troops to Greenland in January fearing a US invasion as tensions spiked over President Donald Trump’s bid to annex it, Danish broadcaster DR said Thursday.
DR said it had seen a military operations order dated January 13, which served as the basis for the deployment of Danish forces in the autonomous Danish territory.
The document described an operation organising the defence of Greenland, immediately after the US operation in Venezuela to oust president Nicolas Maduro.
‘When Trump says all the time that he wants to buy Greenland, and then we see what happens in Venezuela — we had to take all possible scenarios seriously,’ a Danish military official speaking on condition of anonymity told DR.
‘The official machinery of the United States is not working the way it used to,’ he added.
Under cover of a NATO exercise dubbed ‘Arctic Endurance’, a Danish regiment and elite forces were sent to Greenland, as well as French alpine troops and German and Swedish soldiers, DR said.
It was a real deployment and not an exercise, another source told DR.
‘There was no possible ambiguity,’ he said. The troops were deployed with blood for transfusions and explosives, the source said to back up the claim it was not an exercise.
Neither the Danish military nor government, nor the Greenlandic government, have commented on the report.
Trump has repeatedly said he believes the US must control Greenland to ensure its national security, and long refused to rule out the use of military force to get it.
Like the US, Denmark is a founding member of NATO.
After several intense weeks of aggressive remarks that plunged the alliance into its deepest crisis in years, Trump backed down from his threats on January 21, announcing that he had reached a ‘framework’ agreement on Greenland with NATO’s secretary general, the details of which remain vague.
In the weeks that followed, NATO launched its Arctic Sentry mission to beef up security in the region, in which Danish and US forces are participating, among others.