NKVC chief says object likely drone, purpose remains key question
Monday 14th September 2026 on 20:30 in
Lithuania
Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre, said the object that flew into the country early on Sunday was most likely a drone, but its purpose remains unclear, LRT reported.
“Without having the object in our hands, it is difficult to say, but judging by its parameters, it can probably be concluded that it was a drone. The key question is what kind of drone it was and what its purpose was,” Vitkauskas said on LRT’s programme Dienos tema.
He said the most dangerous consequence of inaccuracies in the public warning system would be people becoming complacent and assuming that “nothing will happen”.
“Advance warnings and radar data are not always 100 percent accurate. There is always a margin of error and anomalies,” Vitkauskas said, adding that the number of such errors should be reduced as technologies change.
He said it was difficult to determine whether the decision not to warn the public about the unidentified flying object early on Sunday was right or wrong. If the incident posed no danger, not issuing a warning may have been appropriate, he said. However, he added that authorities needed to establish whether the incident was a provocation, an attempt to test Lithuania’s response or a reconnaissance flight.
“In that case, raising the whole of Lithuania at 4 a.m. may not be the best thing if we are not fully certain that society is under threat,” Vitkauskas said.
Colonel Antanas Matutis, commander of the Lithuanian Air Force, said authorities were reconstructing the object’s possible flight path by combining reports from residents, emergency services and the crisis management centre.
He said the process took time because residents’ calls did not go directly to the Air Force. Reports first reached the emergency number 112 and the crisis management centre before being combined with information from military observations.
According to Matutis, authorities were comparing the reports and observed trajectories on a map to determine whether they could be linked to the same object.