A drone explodes in northern Lithuania

A drone exploded on Sunday, 18 October, in the Poswol district of northern Lithuania, damaging a civilian car but injuring no one. On Monday, 19 October, Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius said after a National Security Commission meeting that the drone was a Ukrainian FPV-type machine carrying an explosive charge. Lithuanian authorities consider it highly probable that the aircraft is the one whose wreckage was found in the Poswol area, and Ukraine confirmed it had lost contact with one of its drones during Sunday's operations. The cause of the explosion has not been established, and the possible scenarios include a malfunction, fuel exhaustion, or a crash into the ground or trees.

Which way the drone flew

Lithuania maintains that the drone entered its airspace from Poland. Sinkevičius said there was no doubt about it and pointed to Lithuanian equipment that recorded the moment of entry. Lithuania's Chief of Defence Staff Giedrius Premeneckas said radars first picked up the object at 5.47 (4.47 Polish time) on Polish territory, 30 to 40 km from the Lithuanian border. The drone crossed the border at 6.02 (5.02 in Poland), and at 6.40 (5.40 in Poland) a decision was taken to scramble NATO fighter jets, whose pilots could not make visual contact because of poor weather.

Poland's account differs. Janusz Sejmej, a spokesman for the Polish Ministry of National Defence, said on Sunday that Polish radars did not show the object crossing the border from Poland. On Monday the ministry ordered an analysis of events from the night of 17/18 October near the Lithuanian and Polish-Ukrainian borders, to be carried out with Lithuanian partners, and said it was awaiting official results. Citing ministry sources, Polsat News reported that the drone took off from Lithuanian territory about 30 km from the Polish border without entering Polish airspace, a version Vilnius rejected.

Warnings and the alert

Lithuania declared a red alert on Sunday morning and temporarily closed Kaunas airport, near the country's second-largest city. Sinkevičius explained that warning procedures this time differed from those used for objects arriving from Belarus or the Russian Kaliningrad region. Because the drone came from Poland, a NATO, EU and Schengen member, it was not automatically treated as a threat at first. Premeneckas said that ordering the destruction of a target without visual identification could have serious consequences, and that the services acted in line with applicable procedures. A Rzeczpospolita commentary said that, if Lithuania is right, the case would again show how weak Poland's drone detection remains, and it recalled that more than 20 drones entered Polish airspace on the night of 9 to 10 September 2025.

Ukraine and the next steps

Ukraine's foreign ministry spokesman Heorhij Tychyj apologised for the disruption, threat and concern caused by the incident and said Ukraine would pass all relevant information to Lithuania. In a post on X on Sunday afternoon, he said Russian electronic warfare may have changed the course of the drones during an operation against what he called legitimate military targets in Russia. Lithuanian Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas said on Monday that he had contacted his Polish counterpart and asked for a joint examination of the incident. He added that the incident may have followed a Ukrainian attack on Saint Petersburg, and that Lithuania plans to have an integrated airspace surveillance system by the end of 2027 that would connect existing monitoring systems. Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said various scenarios were being examined.