The unmanned aerial vehicle that crossed into Lithuania from Belarus on Monday has been discovered at the Gaižiūnai training ground in the Jonava District, central Lithuania.
This was confirmed to BNS on Friday by Defence Minister Dovilė Šakalienė.
“We can confirm the drone has been found. More information will be provided soon,” Šakalienė told BNS.
Initial reports suggest the unmanned aerial vehicle resembles a Russian-made Gerbera drone, which is designed to deceive air defence systems by mimicking the appearance of the Iranian-made Shahed combat drone.
Military investigators and bomb disposal experts are on their way to the site.
“Details will be clarified, as the aircraft was located using a search drone. It will be checked for any potential hazards, after which standard procedures will follow, as was the case with the first ‘Gerbera’ in early July,” the Lithuanian Armed Forces stated in a post on Facebook.
Reacting to the news, acting chair of the Social Democratic Party Mindaugas Sinkevičius described the incident as a potential “provocation”.
“I interpret it either as a provocation – the fact that it occurred in Gaižiūnai training area says something. It suggests that not everything is functioning as it should, considering how long the search took,” he said during a press conference following the LSDP board meeting.
Authorities had been investigating various theories regarding the suspected crash of an unidentified object.
The drone was believed to have crossed into Lithuania from Belarus on the morning of July 28. It was seen flying for some time before crashing. The military has been searching for the device for nearly a week.
Residents alerted authorities after being woken by noise from the drone. Earlier in the week, the chief of defence told reporters in Klaipėda that the military had detected an object approaching Lithuanian airspace from Belarus.
It remains unclear whether the object tracked by the military and the one reported by civilians are the same.
A similar incident occurred on July 10, when another drone reportedly entered Lithuanian airspace from Belarus. Authorities initially suspected it was a Shahed drone, commonly used by Russia in Ukraine, but later confirmed it to be a Gerbera.
UAV found using drones
Later on Friday, officials have more details about the discovery.
“Officers used drones available to the Lithuanian Armed Forces and [...] that helped locate the crash site,” Captain Lina Ščiukė, a senior officer in the Military Police drone search operation, told reporters at the Gaižiūnai training area.
Colonel Lieutenant Arūnas Čeriauka, chief of staff at the Air Surveillance and Control Command of the Lithuanian Air Force, confirmed that no military radars capable of detecting the drone in flight were positioned around Jonava.
“There are no radars in the training areas either,” he said.
Ščiukė said investigators have not yet examined the drone and cannot say whether it carried explosives or a control module, or whether it went down after running out of fuel or for another reason.
Čeriauka said the military continues to believe the UAV was a Russian drone misdirected by Ukrainian air defences.
Preliminary findings indicate it flew “in a nice, straight line” from the Belarusian border to the Gaižiūnai training area, he said.
“We were monitoring and possibly saw this object on the Belarusian side, but the detection signals were not stable because of the specifics of the aircraft,” Čeriauka said.
He added that the drone disappeared from radar before crashing.
According to the officer, the Lithuanian Armed Forces’ current radar capabilities were developed to meet requirements set before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The equipment is geared toward larger aircraft rather than drones, but lessons learned from the war in Ukraine will lead to upgrades, Čeriauka added.
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