On Wednesday morning, Vilnius feared it was under attack.
The president and prime minister were bundled into a bomb-proof bunker, flights were cancelled, roads ground to a halt and thousands of Lithuanians hid in underground car parks.
It was the first evacuation order in a Nato capital since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, occurring 1000 miles from the war’s front line. No-one knew where the drones flying overhead had come from.
The alert was the latest in a series of incursions across Nato’s eastern flank in recent months, bringing the Ukraine war closer to home than ever before.
But the drones buzzing over Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Finland were not launched by an enemy: they were Ukrainian drones hijacked and redirected by Russia towards Nato, opening up a new phase of war.
