Lithuania closed Vilnius airport overnight after dozens of cigarette-smuggling balloons entered its airspace, the country\u2019s National Crisis Management Centre (NCMC) has said.<\/p>\n
The disruption, which lasted from 10:30 pm on Tuesday until 6:30 am on Wednesday, led to the cancellation of 30 flights and stranded approximately 4,000 passengers, according to the airport.<\/p>\n
Incoming flights had to be redirected to other destinations, including Warsaw and Lithuania\u2019s Kaunas airport.<\/p>\n
\u201cOperations have been disrupted due to weather balloons used to smuggle cigarettes from Belarus,\u201d the NCMC said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The centre added that the country\u2019s border with Belarus was also closed after the balloon sightings.<\/p>\n
At a press conference on Wednesday morning, Lithuanian Prime Minister Inga Ruginien\u0117, who blamed Belarus for the incident, said she would convene a meeting of the National Security Committee at 1:30 pm to discuss the issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis morning I already demanded that everyone come with concrete solutions. We must discuss this situation immediately and we must find \u2014 not debate, but find \u2014 what to do,\u201d Ruginien\u0117 said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would very much like Belarus to take responsibility for these incidents,\u201c the prime minister added.<\/p>\n
The NCMC said an investigation had been launched, noting that the balloons were not launched from a single place.<\/p>\n
Related<\/p>\n
It is not the first incident of its kind, with Vilnius airport also forced to shut for hours on 5 October because of cigarette-smuggling balloons.<\/p>\n
Lithuanian authorities said at the time that they had found at least 11 balloons carrying 18,000 packs of black-market cigarettes.<\/p>\n
Vilnius airport’s closure came after a challenging few months for European aviation, which has been heavily disrupted as a result of drone sightings at airports in Copenhagen, Munich and the Baltic region.<\/p>\n
The EU has accused Russia of engaging in disruptive hybrid warfare, which Moscow continues to deny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lithuania closed Vilnius airport overnight after dozens of cigarette-smuggling balloons entered its airspace, the country\u2019s National Crisis Management…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[1410,14451,14450,171,14449,14453,14452,14454,170,2743],"class_list":{"0":"post-21217","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-vilnius","8":"tag-belarus","9":"tag-incoming-flights","10":"tag-kaunas-airport","11":"tag-lithuania","12":"tag-national-crisis-management-centre","13":"tag-national-security-committee","14":"tag-ncmc","15":"tag-the-ncmc","16":"tag-vilnius","17":"tag-vilnius-airport"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}