Lithuania to ask NATO to ease rules on shooting down drones

Lithuania will ask NATO to review the rules on shooting down aircraft that violate its airspace, so that pilots can act on radar alone without first visually confirming a drone, Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius said on Monday, according to Lithuanian broadcaster LRT.

"I requested that we start consultations with NATO," Sinkevicius told LRT. He said he expected the review of the alliance's algorithm for responding to drone incursions to take about a month.

Under the current procedure, a fighter pilot who detects an object on radar cannot open fire unless they can see it and confirm visually that it is a drone, Sinkevicius said. Cloud cover or poor weather can prevent that confirmation even when radar has already picked up an intruding aircraft, he said.

Sinkevicius said NATO could leave it to each member state's national law to decide how to respond to an airspace violation, which would give Lithuania more discretion to shoot down a radar-detected object without a visual check, LRT reported. He did not say when such a change might take effect beyond the month-long consultation period he had proposed.

The proposal follows an incident on Sunday in which a drone crossed into Lithuanian airspace from Poland, LRT reported. NATO fighter jets based on rotation at Lithuania's Zokniai air base were scrambled, according to APA Azerbaijan, which polices the country's skies as part of the alliance's Baltic air-policing mission.

The pilots could not see the object and did not confirm it was a drone, so they held their fire, LRT said. Debris from an explosion was later found in the village of Juodzioniai, in the Pasvalys district of northern Lithuania, the broadcaster reported.

Lithuanian officials said the drone was Ukrainian and carried explosives. Ukraine apologised for the incident, saying the drone may have been diverted by Russia.