Lithuanian border guards did not capture drone's entry from Belarus - chief

VILNIUS - Lithuanian border guards did not capture an unmanned aerial vehicle that may have entered the country from Belarus on Monday, Rustamas Liubajevas, commander of the State Border Guard Service, said on Monday.

"In this case, we did not record the entry of that particular object into the Lithuanian airspace. I would like to remind you that according to its competence, the SBGS has border surveillance systems, not airspace surveillance systems, and they are deployed at the Belarusian or Russian border, intended for monitoring and controlling the border," he told a press conference at the Interior Ministry today.

The SBGS is not responsible for airspace control, surveillance and defense, Liubajevas pointed out.

In his words, according to the algorithm approved by the Government, if border guards visually detect an object or if any object is detected through their surveillance system, the information about it is handed over to the relevant authorities, including the Defense Ministry, the Lithuanian Armed Forces, and the Air Force.

"All actions related to the entry of this object into Lithuanian airspace are further coordinated by the Air Force," Liubajevas said.

ONLY RIFLES

On the other hand detecting and neutralizing drones is not a problem of a single institution, it's a problem for all agencies, Liubajevas said, adding hat his officers have the means to deal with smuggling drones.

"We have anti-drone equipment we cans use to neutralize them, down them, or those drones can lose contact with the operator and just fall down. In such a case, our officers go to the scene and then certain measures are taken to intercept the smugglers who come to pick up the goods," Liubajevas explained.

According to him, SBGS officers can also use a firearm against a drone or another object if it poses a threat to human life or health.

"But we do not have special means for their destruction, kinetic destruction, apart from assault rifles, which are used in our service today," he stressed. "It must be understood that the use of an assault rifle has little chance of neutralizing by kinetic means an object that is flying high at high speed."

BELIEVED TO HAVE FALLEN ALREADY

According to Arunas Paulauskas, commissioner general of the Lithuanian Police, the Emergency Response Center received the first report of a flying object near Medininkai in Vilnius District from residents at 5.55 a.m.

"After this report, four more reports were received within about 15 minutes. Both the information and the coordinates received confirmed that this was real information, and the movement direction of the object was established, and all Lithuanian police forces were immediately informed to pay attention to it and, of course, a decision was made to immediately send a message through the population information system to all Lithuanian citizens to be vigilant," the police chief said.

In total, about 30 reports of the UAV sightings have been received.

Meanwhile, residents reported on social media hearing the sound of the drone as early as 5 a.m.

According to the commissioner, the information received did not allow to determine either the distance the object could fly or its threat level.

"From each report, we try to reconstruct the direction of movement of this object and the possible location of its fall. We share this information with the Lithuanian Armed Forces as it's searching for this object," Paulauskas said.

In his words, the latest report on the sighting came from central Lithuania, closer to Kaunas. As no further signals about the drone's movements are received, officers assume that it has fallen.

REJECTS CRITICISM

As BNS reported, the drone was reported on Monday morning, and the public were alerted shortly after 7 a.m.

The Lithuanian Air Force claimed to have detected the object while it was still in Belarus and the information was passed on to NATO's Combined Air Operations Center. According to the military, the most likely version is that it is a Russian aircraft disoriented by the Ukrainian air defense.

Renatas Pozoela director of the Fire and Rescue Department, rejects criticism that the population should have been warned about the potential danger earlier, saying that the service was informed by the National Crisis Management Center after 6 a.m. that the population would need to be informed.

"We connected the servers, activated the system and waited for the final decision on when the message was to be sent and the content of the message itself. As soon as that message was received and we received the order from the National Crisis Management Center, the message was sent throughout the territory of Lithuania," Pozela said, adding that about 95 percent of Bite users, 90 percent of Telia users and 99 percent of Tele 2 used received the message shortly after 7 p.m.

"Another point to be made is that the population alert and information system is not just about sending messages. It is also about sirens. And certainly, if received information about real danger, according to the algorithms in place, the sirens would have been switched on and people would have received additional information about the need to switch on the public radio LRT, which would have allowed them to hear instructions and orders (...) There was no such order, so only a message with the relevant content was sent," Pozela said.

This is the second time this month that Lithuania has recorded a drone entering from Belarus.

On July 10, after a UAV entered Lithuanian airspace, authorities initially suspected it was a Shahed drone, the type used by Russia in its war against Ukraine, but it was later identified as Gerbera, a Russian-made drone designed to deceive air defenses.

Following this incident, additional army capabilities will be deployed closet to the Belarusian border, Chief of Defense General Raimundas Vaiksnoras told reporters in Klaipeda earlier in the day.