Lithuania will set up mobile air defence teams based on Ukraine’s experience amid Russia’s attacks, Public Security Service (VST) commander Viktoras Grabauskas told reporters on Tuesday.
“We are already developing this concept and, next year, we will have these fire teams ready – perhaps not yet as fully equipped as we would like, but they will have the necessary kinetic capabilities,” Grabauskas said.
In July, the Interior Ministry and Vilnius City Municipality already agreed to coordinate defences against drones after two Russian-type UAVs crossed into Lithuania. One of them carried explosives and flew over the Lithuanian capital before crashing at a military training field.
Last week, contraband-carrying balloons launched from Belarus grounded flights on four separate occasions, which Lithuanian officials are calling a hybrid attack by the Minsk regime.
Although the Lithuanian military has the means to shoot down the balloons, this could pose a threat to people living in the 30-kilometre stretch between Vilnius and the Belarusian border.
“In assessing our expectations, the military evaluated the distance from the border towards Vilnius, and we can say that without taking major risks, there is little territory where we could neutralise the balloons. Why? Because the area is quite densely populated,” Colonel Gintaras Koryzna said on Tuesday during a meeting of opposition parliamentary groups.
“Again, the responsibility lies with the operator – the military – to decide whether or not to use the so-called kinetic means to neutralise the balloons. The point is that, in our assessment, more than 70% of the territory is marked red – a so-called no-go area as of today,” he said.
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