The main national airport of Lithuania is being repeatedly shut down by weather balloons carrying packets of contraband cigarettes being floated over from Russia-ally Belarus and they will now be shot down, the nation’s Prime Minister has vowed.
The Lithuanian military will now be authorised to take “all necessary measures” including “kinetic” against the repeated incursions of large weather balloons into the NATO-member’s airspace from neighbouring Belarus. Vilnius Airport was shut down by the balloons four times last week, disrupting the travel of thousands of people.
While the balloons are said to be the work of smugglers moving contraband cigarettes to the European Union, Lithuanian Prime Minister Inga Ruginiene says the fact the Belarussian government is taking a permissive attitude to the smugglers means it is yet another form of the “hybrid attacks” being waged against Europe by Moscow.
As well as the cigarette balloons, Lithuania also voiced protest at what was said to have been an 18-second incursion into its airspace by two Russian jets transiting out of Kaliningrad (Königsberg, Królewiec), a Russian exclave in northern Europe. While the flight’s time in NATO airspace was brief, it was without permission and came amid an intense discussion among European alliance partners about when to shoot down Russian aircraft, and was decried as a “crude violation of international law and the territorial sovereignty of Lithuania”.
As well as announcing a new shootdown policy on Belarussian balloons, Lithuania also stated it was closing the border with Belarus. The closure will be all but complete, and will allow only the return of Lithuanian and European Union member-state citizens back to Europe should they have found themselves on the wrong side of the frontier at the time of the closure, and for the passage of diplomatic traffic.
Prime Minister Ruginiene is reported to have said: “Today we have decided to take the strictest measures. There is no other way… This sends a clear signal to Belarus that no hybrid attack will be tolerated here, and we will take the strictest possible measures to stop such actions”.
Belarus, which lies between the European Union and the Russian Federation, borders Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. It has become a major source of what are called hybrid attacks against Europe, which European political leaders state are pursued by Minsk at the behest of Moscow.
These hybrid attacks, it is stated, are part of a strategy of low-intensity, pre-war and sub-conflict pin-pricks intended to erode European coherence. Perhaps the best-known instance of these moves is the apparent response of Moscow and Minsk to the Europe Migrant Crisis, where they are said to have observed how destabilising of the European Union and national governments the barely-resisted arrivals of millions of migrants to the continent.
Seeming to want to exacerbate that issue, Minsk flies would-be migrants from around the world to Belarus and then puts them on buses to head directly to Europe’s frontier at the Polish border. Poland’s closure and fortification of the Belarus border has led to clashes and, allegedly, deliberately manufactured human rights crises meant by Minsk to embarrass or erode trust in Warsaw.
Other strategies are more direct, and European governments frequently prosecute and imprison what they say are Russian agents engaged in campaigns of sabotage against infrastructure.
Today’s border closure is not the first time Lithuania has shut its border with Belarus, which has been a frequent if fleeting affair, but it is the first time they said it would be a lasting arrangement.
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