EU Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius has called on the Baltic countries to build a “drone wall,” but this should not come as a surprise after last week’s bomb scare.
Lithuania’s Speaker of the Seimas Saulius Skvernelis and Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas were evacuated to bomb shelters following Belarus’s violation of Lithuanian airspace last week.
While it was originally suspected that a Russian Shahed kamikaze drone had flown into Lithuanian airspace, writes Do Rzeczy, it turned out that a small, home-built aircraft had crossed over from Belarus, according to the State Border Protection Service (VSAT).
The investigation is ongoing, but the aircraft crashed near a closed border checkpoint in Shumsk, about a kilometer from the Belarusian border.
“This incident demonstrates that such a drone is capable of violating Lithuanian airspace. It remains an open question whether Lithuania is ready to defend itself against such threats and whether it has the necessary capabilities,” said Kubilius, Lithuania’s representative to the European Commission, on LRT television.
“Therefore, I appeal to Lithuania and other countries in the region to work on the Eastern Border Defense Plan: a physical defense plan, primarily consisting of installing a series of physical barriers on the ground, but encompassing not only a physical wall but also the creation of a drone wall.”
The EU defense commissioner emphasized that there is “little evidence” that Lithuania and the other Baltic states are well-prepared to respond to potential drone attacks from Russia.
“Right now, it’s not so much about producing and storing drones, but about educating and training teams of people who would be able to produce drones very quickly, at any time, in the numbers required for a drone wall,” he said.
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