VILNIUS — Residents of three Latvian municipalities were urged on Sunday to shelter indoors and keep two walls between themselves and the outside, while NATO fighter jets over northern Lithuania tracked an object that, in difficult weather, their pilots could not visually identify.
According to Lithuanian Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas, the jets, flying a NATO air defence mission, were tracking the object in the Biržai district on Sunday morning. “Due to difficult weather conditions, the fighter jet pilots are currently unable to visually identify the object,” he wrote on social media, Euronews reported. TEH reported last month that Germany was sending four Eurofighters to Latvia to cover its October 3 election.
The Latvian military said it appeared the jets “did not shoot down the suspected unmanned aerial vehicle” and that it was possible the object “detonated on its own,” according to the same Euronews report. Both halves of that statement are hedged. Euronews also said the origin of the suspected drone remains unclear.
What is firmer is the disruption. The Latvian military added that the incident, close to its border, triggered multiple air alerts. Xinhua reported that Lithuania issued red alerts for Panevezys and Siauliai counties and an initial yellow alert for Kaunas county on Sunday morning, then lifted them after NATO fighter jets were scrambled to search for an unidentified object that may have entered Lithuanian airspace. Latvia’s National Armed Forces lifted an orange air threat alert for Bauska, Aizkraukle and Ogre, which it had issued earlier in the day to urge residents to shelter indoors. That alert did not specify the nature or origin of the threat, Xinhua said.
Lithuanian military personnel were heading to the location where radio signal was lost to carry out a ground inspection, and investigations were ongoing, Euronews reported.
Euronews called the episode the latest in a growing series of drone incursions and incidents along NATO’s eastern flank, many of them believed to be spillover from the war in Ukraine. It noted that Romanian authorities had announced on Saturday that Romanian F-16s shot down two drones over the Black Sea.
For now the public record holds a lost radio signal, pilots who could not visually identify the object and a Latvian statement that it may have detonated on its own. What it was, and who sent it, is still open.
