Article · Geopolitics · Lithuania
A drone shot down over Lithuania for the first time. What is new, and what has been repeating since 2021?
The response is new, the incursion is not. Drones have come down in Lithuania before, but this is the first shot down in the air, and as of 15 September nobody has established whose it was or whether it carried explosives. On 16 September President Gitanas Nausėda said that, on the information available, it was a Russian Gerbera drone, most likely meant for Ukraine and diverted by Ukrainian electronic warfare.
On 15 September, a few minutes after midnight, people around Vilnius, Trakai and Elektrėnai, and later Kaunas, received air alert messages on their phones. At about 00:20 Italian fighters that took off from Šiauliai shot down a drone in Kaišiadorys district, near the village of Pratkūnai, not far from Kruonis. The alert was lifted at about 00:50. (LRT, 2026-09-15)
LRT reports it is the first drone ever shot down over Lithuanian territory. (LRT, 2026-09-15)
This piece separates three things that headlines merge: what is confirmed about that night, what similar has already happened, and which Russian threats were made in public as opposed to acts attributed to Russia only later.