Squeezed between Russia and Kremlin-allied Belarus, Lithuania has for years been warning of the risks to Russia's Baltic neighbours. But as Ukraine stepped up its retaliatory strikes on Russian oil hubs in the Baltic Sea and its drones were found straying across the region, the side effects of the war that it had been warning against caught Lithuania off guard.The alert on May 20 for people to flee underground over a drone in Lithuanian airspace was the starkest reminder in years that emergency planning should be fully operational. Gaskauskaite found that it was not."We have this app ... that says where all the nearby shelters are," the 29-year-old culture project manager told AFP. "We went to one of them, but it was covered in cobwebs. And it seemed that no one was there".
An unprecedented drone alert in May exposed widespread problems of shelter access in Lithuania © Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP
It was only the third underground shelter marked in the vicinity of her flat that Gaskauskaite managed to get into -- but not without an almost 20-minute wait for it to be unlocked. The alert was the first time an EU and NATO capital had had to warn its population to take shelter since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.'Gaps' to be fixedGaskauskaite soon found that her case was not isolated.After the alert was lifted, accounts of disgruntled residents who had been barred from entering shelters in schools or found them shut started pouring in. "Unfortunately, that test showed that there are some ... blind spots that we didn't think about," Gaskauskaite said.Problems were so commonplace that Lithuanian Prime Minister Inga Ruginiene -- who had taken shelter with the country's president and lawmakers -- offered a public apology for communication errors and vowed a review of procedures. "You cannot be fully prepared for all the situations," Deputy Defence Minister Tomas Godliauskas told AFP, while conceding there are "some gaps that we would like to fix" in Lithuania's planning."We have to improve our approach to the shelter system," he said, including knowing how the shelters are managed and who owns them.
