Lithuania’s military resumed searches in the Vilnius and the southeastern Varėna districts on Thursday for a suspected drone that triggered an air alert across parts of the country.
"We had to stop yesterday due to darkness, so additional capabilities are being deployed today. The weather seems fair, clouds are not very low, and a helicopter will be used, as it was yesterday. Up to 100 troops from both the land forces and military police will continue what we started yesterday," Lithuanian Chief of Defence Raimundas Vaikšnoras told LRT.
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According to Vaikšnoras, information provided by residents is particularly important, including interviews, video recordings, or other material that could help identify or locate the potential site of the object.Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of the National Crisis Management Centre, said that if the object is not found, the search area will shift south, as the aircraft may have reached Belarus."If nothing is found, the area will shift further south, as the question remains whether it crashed here or managed to fly into Belarus. [...] Until the object is found, no one can say for sure, but all parameters recorded by radars [...] point to a drone," Vitkauskas said.A public warning was issued in Lithuania on Wednesday morning regarding the potential entry of a drone into the country's airspace. Contact with the object was later lost, prompting a search for its possible crash sites.
