Drone wreckage was discovered on Sunday evening in Lithuania’s Utena district near the settlement of Samanys. No signs of an explosion were found.
“According to the preliminary data, what we can see from the wreckage and the information sent by our colleagues, (…) this is most likely a Ukrainian drone,” head of the National Crisis Management Center Vilmantas Vitkauskas said, according to BNS.
It is currently impossible to determine exactly when the drone crossed into Lithuanian airspace. As the agency notes, Latvian military personnel detected a drone entering the country’s airspace early Sunday morning before it later left Latvia’s airspace. Lithuanian military forces did not detect the UAV entering the country.
Updated at 8:50 a.m.
State Border Guard Service representative Gedrius Mišutis told Delfi that the drone had been spotted by a border patrol monitoring the Belarusian border on Sunday morning.
“A border guard stationed about 3 km from the border heard a sound resembling that of an unmanned aerial vehicle. Using a thermal imaging device, he spotted an object flying from the border deeper into Lithuania,” he said.
According to Mišutis, border guards cannot determine the drone’s origin or characteristics, but the military had been informed about it.