Czechia and Slovakia sent aircraft to fight the fires in France, and the EU crisis commissioner now says extreme conditions are looming over both
Hadja Lahbib named four more countries on Tuesday. The European Union's commissioner for crisis management said extreme conditions are looming for Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, in addition to France and the Iberian Peninsula, where she said the situation is expected to worsen, including in Portugal starting that day. Two of the countries she named already have aircraft in France.
The Commission's own account of the deployment, published on July 27 by its civil protection and humanitarian aid directorate, carries the figures. In France the EU has deployed 7 planes and 4 helicopters, contributed by Czechia, Croatia, Germany, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden and Türkiye, and the directorate says most of those aircraft are part of the rescEU firefighting fleet. In Spain it has mobilised 6 planes from Greece, Italy and Türkiye, together with 134 personnel and 41 vehicles from Portugal. That is 17 aircraft across the two countries.
The mechanism works by asking. When a country requests help, the request is shared with all 37 participating countries, each offers the aircraft, helicopters, teams, equipment or experts it is able to make available, and the Commission coordinates and cofinances the deployment. If those national offers are not enough, the EU can draw on rescEU, its own strategic reserve, which the directorate describes as a fleet of 22 planes and 5 helicopters. The document does not break out how many of the aircraft now in France and Spain come from that reserve rather than from national offers, so the portion of the reserve still uncommitted cannot be read from it.
Lahbib's statement in that document is about capacity rather than weather. "No country should ever have to face a disaster of this scale alone," she said. "That is exactly why Europe built a common response capacity: aircraft in the sky, firefighters on the ground, and more support standing ready the moment it is needed."
The directorate describes the fires as having triggered one of the biggest evacuation operations in Europe, displacing more than 300,000 people across France and Spain. Euronews reported on Tuesday that firefighters near Bordeaux had prevented the blaze from expanding overnight, with several flare-ups, and that the fire has burned around 42,000 hectares over six days, forced 220,000 people to evacuate and destroyed 240 homes. In Spain, it reported that blazes west of Madrid have forced around 60,000 people to leave, and that Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska described the coming hours as absolutely decisive.
Heat is why the timing matters. Météo-France has forecast temperatures of up to 40C from Tuesday, with dry winds. Spain's weather agency AEMET has forecast a new heatwave running from Wednesday to the end of the week, reaching 42C in the northeast and 39C in central areas. Euronews reported that around 150,000 hectares have burned in Spain and 115,000 in France since the start of the year, and that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez asked citizens across Spain to take every possible precaution. President Emmanuel Macron, who visited the departmental fire and rescue operational centre in Bordeaux on Monday, said the coming weeks would be tough and that the country has to hold out.
Two other pieces of the response sit in the Commission's account. A European Commission liaison officer is in Bordeaux helping national authorities coordinate EU assistance, and the Copernicus satellite service is producing rapid emergency maps for responders on the ground. Firefighting teams from other European countries had already been pre-positioned in France and Spain before the fires began, as part of the preparedness measures taken ahead of this year's season.
