Several NATO reconnaissance aircraft have been monitoring the airspace over Lithuania since the morning of 28 July, when a foreign drone was spotted in the skies over the Baltic country, flying in from Belarus.
One of the aircraft, a Boeing RC-135V Rivet Joint, arrived from Mildenhall military airfield in the UK, another, a Bombardier Challenger 650 Artemis, departed from the Lithuanian airfield in Šiauliai and is flying over Latvia, Lithuania and Poland through the “Suvala Corridor”, while the third, also a Bombardier Challenger 650 Artemis, arrived from Moldova and is flying around the Kaliningrad region.
Lithuanian Army Commander-in-Chief General Raimundas Vaiksznaras said after the drone incident: there is currently a plan to deploy additional air defence assets closer to the border because we see that there are certain trends. We know roughly the directions, we know where these corridors probably lead, this is the second incident, and we will reinforce in this place.
On 28 July it was revealed that another Royal Air Force reconnaissance aircraft, a Boeing RC-135W Rivet Joint, was on its way to the Baltic States, this time from Waddington Air Base.
On the morning of 28 July, an unidentified drone flew into Lithuanian airspace from Belarus. It was spotted over the country’s capital, Vilnius.
The police sent an SMS warning to Vilnius residents advising them to stay away from the drone and to call the emergency services at 112 in case it was spotted.