Kenneth Glad
People were forced to react quickly when a security alert interrupted a normal day in the city. The episode showed how modern threats can reach public life before officials have clear answers.
Phones across Vilnius blared on 20 May with a warning most residents had never had to act on: Possible air danger.
Linas Kojala, CEO of the Vilnius-based Geopolitics and Security Studies Center, wrote in The Guardian that he was walking to brief Austrian business and academic visitors when the order came to find shelter.
The city did not freeze. Cafe tables still lined the streets, people glanced down at their screens, and the pace around him changed.
Some kept moving. Others hurried. Kojala’s meeting was shifted into a library cellar, where visitors and local residents crowded below ground.
A drone vanished without answers
Kojala wrote that Lithuanian officials believed a Ukrainian drone aimed at Russian military or energy infrastructure may have been pushed off course into Lithuanian airspace. The drone did not hit anything and has not been found.
The lack of certainty was the problem, according to Kojala. A lost drone, electronic interference and a deliberate test can all create the same first reaction: Sirens, phone alerts and people looking for cover.
His column also pointed to other incidents: Drones exploded in Latvia, were shot down over Estonia, and a Russian-made Geran-2 struck an apartment block in Romania, injuring two civilians, including a child.
The Baltics know this pressure
For Lithuania and its neighbors, aerial threats sit alongside other forms of disruption. Kojala cited cyberattacks, disinformation, GPS jamming, sabotage concerns and undersea cable incidents as part of the pressure facing the region.
He also cited the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which found that Russian-linked attacks in Europe nearly tripled from 2023 to 2024, after quadrupling the previous year.
Lithuania has answered with spending and civilian readiness. Kojala wrote that the country plans to spend 5.38% of GDP on defense in 2026. He also noted that membership in the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union has grown by about a third since 2024.
NATO is being watched
NATO should turn Baltic air policing into a fuller air defense mission, able to detect, track and neutralize threats when needed, advices Kojala.
In the library basement, the Austrian visitors were no longer hearing an abstract warning about European security. They were sitting inside it.
For Kojala, the lesson was direct: Cities on NATO’s eastern edge cannot treat the war nearby as something safely outside daily life.
Source: The Guardian
