Lithuania’s foreign minister Kęstutis Budrys has called on the European Union to deepen its sanctions against Belarus after a series of cigarette-smuggling balloon incursions into the country’s airspace.
“We want the sanctions regime (of the EU) to be strengthened against Belarus,” Budrys told Euronews’ interview programme ”12 minutes with…’ on Tuesday, adding that Brussels should move to specifically target Belarus’ aviation and banking sectors.
He spoke hours after Lithuania temporarily closed its 680 km border with Belarus and ordered its military to shoot down intruding objects. It came after a raft of balloon incursions forced the repeated closures of Lithuanian airports last week, affecting at least 175 flights and 27,000 passengers.
“The Belarusian regime has to feel the consequences of the activites that they do. Otherwise tomorrow they will take something else and they will instrumentalise it and weaponise it,” Budrys explained.
“If we cannot deter it then we are moving through a spiral of escalation.”
Belarus, led by Putin ally Aleksandr Lukashenko, already faces EU sanctions in response to its autocratic drift and complicity in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
Lithuania sees the smuggler balloons as a new tactic in the Kremlin’s hybrid war against the West, in which Belarus has provided a critical staging ground. The country also stands accused ofpushing thousands of would-be asylum seekers across the Polish and Lithuanian borders in a bid to sow chaos and deepen divides.
Despite saying that recent series of balloon incursions into Lithuania’s airspace should be considered part of the “hybrid war” on Europe’s eastern flank, Budrys declined to directly attribute the incidents to the Kremlin at this stage, preferring to point the finger at the Belarusian regime.
“We see that these are the actions of the Belarusian regime right now,” he explained. “Of course it plays into the hands of Russia and the consequences are the same as those they are trying to impose with their GRU (Russian secret service) operations in our region.”
He also called on the EU to move swiftly with its range of defence initiatives to protect the eastern flank from such incursions, despite the divisionsthat have emerged over the scale and speed of such efforts. Frontline Baltic states are amongst the biggest proponents of the plans.
The balloons are the latest in a series of provocations attributed to the Kremlin and its proxies in recent weeks, with a sharp uptick in drone sightings across Europe’s east and deeper within the continent, including Denmark and Germany.
Last Thursday, Lithuania also documented the brief incursion of two Russian military aircrafts into its airspace from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Two Spanish Eurofighter Typhoon jets from the NATO Baltic Air Police were scrambled in response.
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