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The drone shot down by NATO over Lithuania overnight on Tuesday had entered the country’s airspace from neighbouring Belarus, Vilnius said.
The drone flew over Lentvaris close to the Lithuanian capital before being brought down near the village of Pratkūnai, according to Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre.
It was the first time a drone was shot down over Lithuanian territory.
The incident puts Minsk back in focus not only for helping Russia carry out drone attacks against Ukraine, but now also as a source of drone threats to NATO territory.
The incursion came just a day after Ukrainian officials said Russia was using Belarusian mobile networks and signal repeaters to support Shahed-type drones during attacks on western Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s advisor Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov said the flight paths of Russian drones during a mass attack on Saturday suggested they were making use of mobile networks across the border.
“If we look at the movement of jet-powered and conventional ‘Shaheds,’ they stay close to the border with Belarus,” Beskrestnov said.
Beskrestnov said he believed the drones probably had access to Belarusian commercial LTE networks.
On Monday Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service separately said recent Russian attacks on the western regions of Rivne, Volyn and Lviv had been supported by communications infrastructure located inside Belarus.
“The air assets launched by Russia were fed with a signal through repeaters that were also located precisely on the territory of this country,” border guard spokesperson Andrii Demchenko said.
The claims suggest Russia is again making use of communications infrastructure inside Belarus to support its drone campaign against Ukraine, months after Kyiv demanded that the equipment be shut down.
Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Oleh Ivashchenko said last week that Kyiv had identified six repeater stations in Belarus used by Russian forces to relay video streams from strike drones, and that some of the equipment had resumed operating.
The equipment has been a source of tension between Kyiv and Minsk since June, when Zelenskyy gave Belarus a week to dismantle or switch off the Russian-installed repeaters, warning that Ukraine would otherwise act itself.
Days later, Zelenskyy said the repeaters had stopped operating on 22 June, although it remained unclear whether they had actually been removed.
The shutdown did not last long. By the end of June Ukrainian military officials said the equipment had not been dismantled and that at least one repeater had been switched back on.
Their apparent return gives Russia another means of maintaining communications with strike drones operating close to Ukraine’s northern and western borders, including areas close to NATO territory.
Russia has increasingly used a mixture of mobile networks and radio technology to maintain links with its long-range strike drones and overcome Ukrainian electronic warfare.