On Tuesday night, a drone that flew from Belarus into Lithuania in the Kaišiadorys district, near the Kruonis hydroelectric power plant, was shot down by Italian fighter jets stationed in Šiauliai.
While the drone was flying over Lithuanian territory, warning messages about a potential air threat were sent to residents of Vilnius and Kaunas counties.
Amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, warnings about possible air threats have been issued in Lithuania in recent months, but this is the first time a drone has been shot down over the country’s airspace. This has previously been done in Latvia and Estonia.
“I believe that the events of this night showed that we have a full range of measures to destroy airspace violators. We see that pilots performing air defense missions are able to destroy such airspace violators.
We have a whole range of ground-based measures that can be used both by our military and by internal service personnel,” the Speaker of the Seimas told journalists.
He reminded that the protection of critical facilities had been strengthened some time ago and that the services are implementing the recommendations provided.
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“So if there were more, probably more would have been shot down,” J. Olekas speculated.
