NATO fighter jets shot down a drone over Lithuania shortly after midnight Tuesday, the first drone ever brought down in Lithuanian airspace. Italian Air Force Eurofighter Typhoons on NATO’s Baltic Air Policing mission out of Šiauliai Air Base made the intercept near Pratkūnai, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Vilnius and close to the Kaunas Reservoir.
The drone crossed in from Belarus and stayed airborne for roughly half an hour, tracking along the edges of populated areas, according to Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre. Air threat warnings went out for Vilnius, Trakai and Elektrėnai, then extended to the Kaunas region as the drone flew west.
Two days earlier, DroneXL covered a NATO scramble and a 38-minute Vilnius Airport closure over a radar contact that turned out to be birds. Same alert chain. Very different object.
Italian Typhoons Made Lithuania’s First Drone Shootdown
Italy’s Air Force took over NATO’s Baltic Air Policing mission at Šiauliai on July 31, 2026, with four Eurofighter Typhoons. Lithuania’s military says it was the first drone ever shot down over the country. Air force commander Antanas Matutis said wreckage was recovered and the drone likely carried explosives.
Who sent it is still open. Vilmantas Vitkauskas of the crisis centre told LRT the drone most likely came from Belarus and put a high probability on an explosive charge aboard, with crews working the site under Operation Skydas, the procedure for blast risk. Lithuanian authorities have named no operator and no origin country pending investigation. Gitanas Nausėda posted on X: “Together with our NATO allies, Lithuania will defend its airspace.” Italian jets joined NATO’s Eastern Sentry shield a year ago.
Poland Pulled a Suspected Gerbera From the Baltic a Day Earlier
Polish troops recovered a drone from the Baltic Sea off the beach at Rusinowo on Monday, near Jarosławiec. A Polish armed forces spokesperson said it appeared to be a Gerbera, a cheap long-range aircraft built from plywood and foam that Russia flies as a decoy.
Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz announced the recovery on X: “Preliminary inspection indicates that it is a Russian military drone.” Poland scrambled fighters again the next day. The Gerbera is the airframe we covered in September 2025, when roughly 20 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace and Warsaw invoked Article 4. Some carry a warhead. Most carry nothing. They exist to make expensive air defenses fire.
NATO Keeps Winning the Intercept and Losing the Math
Figures cited at a NATO Allied Air Command industry event this summer put a typical two-fighter interception near $100,000 before anyone fires a missile. A Gerbera costs a fraction of that. Lithuania has bought 48 US-made Merops interceptors to narrow the gap, Stars and Stripes reports.
Weeks before Tuesday’s shootdown, US troops at Pabradė Training Area, about 15 miles from the Belarusian border, practiced jamming drones down with handheld DroneBuster units. “We make sure that no drones are flying over the base,” said 2nd Lt. Maisa Faasa of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment. (That is the same box the Army secretary publicly trashed in January while telling soldiers to demand better.) Romania is doing the same arithmetic, where a startup pitches a $900 interceptor against $400,000 missile shots.
DroneXL’s Take
The intercept worked. A drone that probably had explosives aboard came down in open country, nobody was hurt, and the Typhoons had it inside half an hour.
Sunday it was birds and a closed airport. Tuesday it was a real aircraft out of Belarus. The alert chain cannot tell those apart until a fighter is airborne, and the scramble bills out the same either way. My read is that the drone was never the weapon. The bill is, run up night after night with the most expensive tool on the ramp.
Forty-eight Merops interceptors will not cover a border this long. Watch the ask the three Baltic presidents made on May 21, 2026, per Aerotime: turn Baltic Air Policing into a full air defense mission with counter-drone capability built in. Until that lands, Eastern Sentry is a jet-shaped answer to a plywood-shaped problem.
Sources: The Guardian, LRT, Stars and Stripes
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
