NATO shoots down drone over Lithuania, president says

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said Tuesday that NATO fighter jets shot down a drone after it entered Lithuanian airspace.

“A drone that just entered Lithuanian airspace was destroyed by NATO fighter jets,” Nauseda wrote on X. He said such readiness was important for the region as Russia intensified its aggression against Ukraine.

Lithuanian national radio LRT, citing preliminary data from the National Crisis Management Centre, reported that the drone came from Belarus, was heading west and fell in a rural area near Lake Kaunas in central Lithuania.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys thanked allies whose presence he said helped protect Lithuanian airspace. He said the incident showed allied unity and readiness.

Poland separately said it had begun preventive aviation operations because of Russian jet-powered drones carrying out strikes on Ukrainian territory. It said the operations were aimed at protecting airspace, especially near threatened areas.

Belarusian opposition leader in exile Svetlana Tikhanovskaya condemned the incident. “We refuse to accept our country being turned into a source of danger to Europe,” she wrote on X.

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are NATO members on the alliance's eastern flank and share borders with Russia. They have regularly reported drone incursions since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In May, a NATO fighter shot down a Ukrainian drone over Estonia, described in the supplied material as the first interception of a foreign drone in the airspace of a Baltic state by NATO's air police since the war began.

The incident comes amid broader tensions between Lithuania and Russia. Lithuania has started the process of lifting a constitutional ban on storing nuclear weapons on its soil, and Russia threatened last week to aim nuclear warheads at Lithuania if it hosted weapons from NATO allies' nuclear arsenals.