Residents of Vilnius were told to take shelter, and Lithuania‘s president and prime minister were taken to secure locations after an alarm over drone activity near the border with Belarus went off.
The incident comes amid rising jitters in NATO’s eastern bloc over incursions related to Russia’s war with Ukraine.
An emergency announcement from the military told people within the Vilnius region to ‘immediately head to a shelter or a secure place’.
The alert, which lasted for about an hour, also led to the closure of the airspace over Vilnius Airport.
President Gitanas Nauseda and Prime Minister Inga Ruginiene were taken to shelters, and there was also an evacuation order at Lithuania’s parliament, the Seimas, the BNS news agency reported.
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Lithuania has needed to cope with aerial threats since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine back in 2022.
Vilnius Airport was shut a staggering nine times in reference to unusual balloon swarms.
‘Based on the parameters we saw, it’s almost certainly either a combat drone or a drone designed to deceive systems and lure targets,’ Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre, said in a news briefing.
‘The electronic countermeasures here can’t tell us whether an explosive device detonated or not. It’s very, very difficult.’
Based on the altitude and speed, it was probably a drone, he said, ‘though we will’t say at this stage exactly what type of drone it was or where it was launched from.’
Lithuania borders Russia-allied Belarus to the east and Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave to the west.
Belarus reported the potential drone to Lithuania, in accordance with Brigadier General Nerijus Stankevicius, commander of the Lithuanian Army’s Land Forces.
In recent months, Ukrainian drones aimed toward Russia have crossed or come down in NATO territory on quite a few occasions.
Western officials have blamed what they are saying is probably going Russian electronic jamming of the drones.
Russia, meanwhile, has renewed threats that it might retaliate if Ukrainian drones are launched from Baltic countries or if those countries are complicit of their use against Russia.
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