New alarm in the Baltic skies, NATO jets rise

Sirens, aircraft alerts, fighter jets in flight. In the end, the drones pass anyway. The night between Tuesday and Wednesday brought NATO's eastern flank back to the front line: alert in all three Baltic countries and two failed attempts to shoot down an unmanned aircraft over Lithuania. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda spoke of a "restless and difficult" night and then warned that other incursions were possible, asking citizens for "patience and understanding".

It all begins in Belarus, where radar detects three drones heading north. Lithuania issued the alert as early as Tuesday evening. Then it's Latvia's turn, which invites the inhabitants of the Ludza region, on the Belarusian border, to seek shelter and activates interceptor drones and air defense units - the alert returns in the area at 00:35 local time. According to the Riga armed forces, two targets enter Latvian airspace and then move away. Another drone, around 1.20 am, passes through Lithuania, briefly crosses into Poland and returns. At that point the Alliance jets rise up and chase him north. Near Biržai they attempted to shoot it down twice, without success: one of the missiles, Euronews reports, missed the target and fell to the ground. The drone then enters Latvia, where the fighters of the NATO air police mission do not have time to get into position to hit it. Then it crosses Estonia and returns to Russia. In all this, demonstrating how complicated the night was, Helsinki also limited flights and navigation in the eastern Gulf of Finland for a few hours.

Who launched the drones remains to be understood. The Lithuanian Chief of Staff, Rear Admiral Giedrius Premeneckas, admits that he still does not know whether the drone that entered Lithuania was Russian or Ukrainian. However, he puts forward a hypothesis: it could have been diverted by electronic warfare, given that that very night Kiev launched a massive drone attack against Russia. It's not a minor detail. In the same hours, further north, on the Gulf of Finland, the port of Ust-Luga, one of the key hubs for Russian oil exports, caught fire.

“A UAV attack hit the port in the Ust-Luga area, causing a fire,” Governor Alexander Drozdenko wrote on Telegram. In all, according to his data, around 150 drones were shot down by anti-aircraft fire, an absolute record so far.

Vilnius, meanwhile, raises its voice against disinformation.

Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of the National Center for Crisis Management, speaks of the "most agitated night in the history of the country". There are also around ten sightings of weather balloons, which forced around 470 passengers to change plans. Vitkauskas called the idea that Lithuania would open its airspace to Russian-bound Ukrainian drones “an absolute lie.” Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius then promised that what happened "will be the subject of a thorough investigation". A National Security Council meeting is also scheduled to discuss access to public shelters.