Italian NATO jet downs a drone over Lithuania near the Kruonis plant

An Italian Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon on NATO Baltic Air Policing duty shot down an unmanned aircraft over Lithuania in the first hours of 15 September. The drone entered from Belarus after midnight, flew for about half an hour, and was destroyed near the village of Pratkūnai in Kaišiadorys district, close to Kaunas and about five kilometres from the Kruonis pumped-storage plant. Lithuanian officials said this was the first time a NATO fighter had downed a drone inside Lithuanian airspace.

President Gitanas Nausėda wrote that the speed of the response showed the readiness the region needs “as Russia escalates its war against Ukraine.” Phone alerts had already gone out in Vilnius and Kaunas telling residents to find cover and wait. State energy company Ignitis flagged the five-kilometre gap to the hydro plant. Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas said soldiers later found and neutralised explosive at the crash site.

Who sent it

Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, speaking at Šiauliai Air Base with Kaunas, said his pilots had “shot down a threat that most probably came from Russia.” Kaunas was more careful in public. Once the flight path and the wreck are read, he said, Lithuania can say whether this was a Russian aircraft and a provocation, or a drone from another country that drifted or was jammed off course. Russia had no immediate comment.

The incident sits in a short Baltic sequence. An unidentified object crossed Lithuania from Belarus toward Kaliningrad two days earlier. Latvia and Estonia have reported their own airspace problems in recent months. A year ago roughly 20 Russian drones entered Poland during a strike on Ukraine and were met by Polish F-16s and Dutch F-35s. Cheap aircraft are now a standing problem on the alliance’s north-east edge. Fighters can cover a wide area. They are also an expensive way to kill a small airframe. Ground interceptors only work if they are already near the track.

Kaunas told LRT that the war can feel a thousand kilometres away and still set the security terms for the Baltic states. “Russia’s unwillingness to come to peace negotiations affects the security of the Baltic region,” he said. Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys called the intercept a message of collective defence.

What happens next on the ground

Forensic teams will try to read markings, software and the explosive. That work decides whether Vilnius treats Tuesday as a spillover or as a probe. Germany is already filling a brigade in Lithuania and has said it will order specialists if volunteers fall short. Italy’s detachment at Šiauliai is the aircraft that fired. Those two facts are now part of the same map: a NATO jet killed a drone five kilometres from a pumped-storage plant, and a larger German force is still being built on the same soil.

The alliance can scramble. It cannot yet say, in public, whose drone it was. That sentence will change when the wreck talks.