Lithuanian residents have discovered a drone in a field near the village of Semane in Utena County in the countryʼs northeast. Authorities believe it is Ukrainian.
LRT writes about this with reference to the Crisis Management Center.
Lithuanian authorities said they had received information about a drone that crashed around 7:00 PM local time on May 17. No explosives were found at the crash site.
The wreckage is still being searched to determine what kind of drone it is, but the preliminary version suggests that it is Ukrainian.
The head of the Crisis Management Center, Vilmantas Vitkauskas, said that the authorities are going to find out how the drone got into Lithuania, at what altitude it was flying, and "what gaps there are in the detection system", because throughout the day yesterday, radars did not record it crossing Lithuanian airspace.
LRT suggests that the drone could have deviated from its course due to Russian electronic warfare, as has happened in other such cases. For example, in March, a Ukrainian military UAV that was supposed to attack the Russian Federation also fell on Lithuanian territory due to electronic warfare.
The day before, it became known that a drone had flown into the airspace of the neighboring country, Latvia, and after some time left Latvian territory. It was on the night of May 17 that the Ukrainian military launched a massive attack on Moscow and the Moscow region.
Drone crashes in the Baltics
In recent months, drones have increasingly entered the airspace of Northern European countries. For example, on the night of May 7, two drones from Russia entered Latvian airspace. One of the downed drones hit empty tanks at an oil depot in the city of Rezekne.
Latvia subsequently launched an investigation, and Latvian Defense Minister Andris Spruds resigned. He explained that he made the decision to protect the Latvian army from being “drawn into a political campaign”. The country’s Prime Minister Evika Silinė also resigned.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha later stated that the drones that flew into Latvia were Ukrainian. They deviated from their course due to Russian electronic warfare (EW) equipment.
On May 13, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine was sending its experts to Latvia and Lithuania to help protect their airspace.
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