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Lithuania's Vilnius airport closed briefly due to balloons
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on November 20, 2025
1 min readLast updated: January 20, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
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Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on November 20, 2025
1 min readLast updated: January 20, 2026
Vilnius airport in Lithuania briefly closed due to balloons from Belarus, linked to smuggling, prompting concerns of hybrid attacks.
VILNIUS (Reuters) -Lithuania's Vilnius airport resumed operations on Thursday evening, after closing for more than an hour due to smugglers' balloons again appearing on radar, Lithuania's National Crisis Management Centre said.
Last month, the Baltic republic closed its border crossings with Belarus in response to airspace disruptions by weather balloons coming in from Belarus, but reopened them earlier on Thursday.
"As the Prime Minister has said, if hybrid attacks of this nature continue, all border checkpoints may be closed again," a spokesperson for Lithuanian premier Inga Ruginiene said in a statement.
Lithuania has said the balloons, which have caused closures at Lithuanian airports, are flown by smugglers transporting contraband cigarettes and blames Belarus's President Alexander Lukashenko for not stopping the practice, calling it a form of "hybrid attack".
Lukashenko has called the border closure a "crazy scam", accusing the West of fighting a hybrid war against Belarus and Russia, ushering in a new era of barbed-wire division.
Air traffic incident reports had decreased in recent weeks, prior to Thursday's closure of Vilnius airport.
(Reporting by Andrius Sytas in Vilnius, writing by Anne Kauranen in Helsinki; Editing by Toby Chopra)
A hybrid attack refers to a strategy that combines different methods or tactics to achieve a goal, often used in the context of security threats or disruptions, such as the use of balloons for smuggling in this article.
Contraband refers to goods that are illegal to import or export. In the context of this article, it pertains to cigarettes being smuggled using balloons.
Airspace disruption occurs when unauthorized objects, such as balloons in this case, interfere with normal air traffic operations, leading to flight delays or cancellations.
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