Lithuania’s government declared a nationwide emergency on Tuesday to bolster security after months of fending off suspicious balloons that have floated into the country’s airspace from neighboring Belarus, disrupting flights and stirring chaos.
There appeared to be no imminent threat that prompted Tuesday’s order, but officials have accused Belarus of this year launching at least 599 weather balloons to smuggle cigarettes into Lithuania, including several in the past week alone, as well as 197 drones.
Officials and experts have called it a campaign of hybrid attacks that stop short of open warfare. More than 350 flights have been delayed, diverted or canceled since October as a result, affecting around 51,000 passengers and forcing the closure of the airport in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, for more than 60 hours. Financial losses have exceeded 750,000 euros (about $873,000), officials said.
“In countering Belarus’s hybrid attack, we must take the strictest measures and protect the areas most affected by this attack,” Prime Minister Inga Ruginiene said in a statement on Tuesday. “All relevant institutions are joining forces to put an end to the threat posed by the smuggled balloons.”
She said that while checkpoints on Lithuania’s borders would be tightened and defensive patrols deployed nightly, residents should not be inconvenienced by the heightened alert. It is meant to allow military and civilian security services to coordinate faster responses to potential sabotage.
Both NATO and the European Union are grappling with how to respond to a barrage of drone incursions, cyberstrikes, political meddling and other efforts to sow public anxiety that Russia and its main ally in Europe, Belarus, are suspected of directing. Both Russia and Belarus have denied deliberately launching so-called hybrid attacks against NATO and E.U. states.
Hybrid attacks use a mix of military, cyber, economic and even psychological tactics to covertly attack or destabilize an enemy. The attackers seek to evade culpability. While the impact of the attacks in Europe has been more unnerving than catastrophic, officials and experts fear that a miscalculated plot could eventually cause widespread destruction or even deaths.
The balloons being sent into Lithuania are part of a larger hybrid campaign in which “disruption, certainly, is one aim,” said Charlie Edwards, a hybrid warfare expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a former intelligence and security strategist for Britain.
The balloons were an example of how adversaries “can create visible uncertainty and just try and disrupt things,” Mr. Edwards said. “That begins to cause public panic”
NATO and E.U. member states that support Ukraine defending itself against Russia’s full-scale invasion have been hit by a surge of hybrid attacks since 2022, when the war began.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said last week that additional sanctions were being prepared against Belarus to punish “growing incursions of smuggling balloons into Lithuania’s airspace.” Lithuania’s interior ministry urged the commission not just to punish Belarus with financial sanctions but also to design a better response system to hybrid attacks.
Mr. Edwards suggested that the E.U.’s law enforcement agency, Europol, better coordinate investigations of hybrid strikes across the continent. More broadly, however, he said Europeans should approach hybrid warfare similar to how NATO responded to terrorism threats over the past 20 years, with better intelligence-sharing and joint investigations.
“Then we are more proactive in how we go after them rather than, at the moment, being more passive in terms of our response to the hybrid warfare,” Mr. Edwards said.
Compared with a year ago, European officials are rebuking Russia more forcefully and more often, embracing a naming-and-shaming strategy to deter hybrid attacks. That has not quieted growing demands across Europe for stronger protections and penalties.
Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, last week maintained that the military alliance is addressing hybrid threats but often retaliates in secret. He suggested the balloon incursions in Lithuania were a case in point.
“We will react in a way of our own choosing, and they will feel it,” Mr. Rutte said.
Lara Jakes, a Times reporter based in Rome, reports on conflict and diplomacy, with a focus on weapons and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. She has been a journalist for more than 30 years.
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