Kremlin media intensifies disinformation campaign against Lithuania

Kremlin-aligned media continues an active disinformation campaign against Lithuania, using the contraband balloon crisis to discredit the country’s institutions, LRT reported, citing a new analysis by Debunk.org, a disinformation research centre.

The number of balloon incursions into Lithuania has declined since an agreement between the United States and Belarus, but hostile media have continued their attacks, the analysis found.

“Last year, the narratives mainly sought to emphasise the alleged illegality of Lithuania’s decision to close its border with Belarus and the economic damage it caused Lithuanians. This year, compared with other narratives, those claiming that Lithuania refuses to engage in dialogue with Belarus, downplaying the threat posed by the balloon crisis and, at the same time, Lithuania’s statehood as such, have strengthened considerably,” Debunk.org chief analyst Algirdas Kazlauskas said in a statement.

The share of the narrative denying Belarus’s responsibility for causing the contraband balloon crisis rose to 35.6 percent of the total disinformation flow this year. According to the centre, a key turning point in both the crisis and the spread of disinformation narratives came after US-Belarus talks concluded with an agreement in mid-December.

Following the agreement, balloons stopped flying over Lithuania for almost a month and a half. When incidents resumed, they did not reach the scale seen in the second half of 2025. Hostile media largely ignored the renewed flights and instead consistently promoted the claim that Lithuania was sabotaging the forthcoming US-Belarus agreement.

The analysis also examined the broader wave of drone incursions in 2025 and 2026, which affected not only Lithuania but also Poland, Estonia, Romania, Norway and the Netherlands. According to Kazlauskas, Kremlin-aligned media attempted to shift responsibility for the incidents to Ukraine or NATO, while questioning whether the incidents had occurred at all in an effort to create the impression that they had been artificially staged by the West.

The study found that Lithuania was portrayed at different times as both an insignificant and weak country and a dangerous provocateur. “These contradictory images are sometimes created even in the same text. This is a deliberate effort to destroy any stable, shared understanding of reality among readers,” Kazlauskas said.

The study also raises the possibility that some narratives were prepared before Lithuania decided to close its border. Kazlauskas stressed that this remains a hypothesis requiring further research, but said that criticism appearing before the decision it attacked suggested that at least some narratives may have been prepared in advance rather than emerging spontaneously.

Debunk.org examined more than 1,500 articles published by Kremlin-aligned Russian-language media between January 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026.