For weeks now, the European sky has become a silent front of hybrid warfare: brief incursions, weak signals, ambiguous trajectories and objects that, without carrying clear flags, force airport closures, diversions of trade routes and military responses that consume resources and erode civil normality. The pattern is repeated from the Baltics to Central Europe and seems designed to measure NATO’s reflexes.
Now something else has arrived, and it’s not drones or fighter jets.
Balloon waves. Lithuania has announced that it will shoot down any balloon crossing from Belarus after detecting 66 nighttime intrusions in one go and chaining closures of Vilnius airport. The government described the phenomenon as a hybrid attack and activated the closure of the eastern border, initially temporary but set to become indefinite, with minimal exceptions for diplomats and EU citizens in transit.
The decision marks a turning point on NATO’s eastern flank, where violations of airspace by drones, balloons and Russian aircraft have become recurrent in recent weeks, from Estonia and Poland to Denmark, Norway and Germany, fueling the impression of a sustained campaign of provocations calibrated to measure reflexes, saturate defenses and erode political tolerance to the cost of deterrence.
Nature and sign. The balloons (some weighing more than 50 kilos, also used for tobacco smuggling) are interpreted not only as a criminal economy but as a cheap instrument of psychological warfare and technical testing: they stretch the “gray zone” five kilometers inward, force airport closures, degrade logistics, strain the civil and military decision chain and expose the friction of activating rules of engagement against targets without a classic military signal.
Lithuania will involve NASAMS, RBS-70, Avenger and MANPADS in the neutralization, despite stocks depleted by transfers to Ukraine and the intrinsic difficulty of shooting down balloons with low radar signature and low kinetic energy. The political message is deliberate: any permeability (even if it seems marginal) will be treated as a strategic precedent.
Escalation in NATO. We said at the beginning, the episode comes after penetrations by Su-30, Il-78 and MiG-31 in the Baltics, and after the recording of swarms of drones over Poland, Denmark, Munich or the Baltic, with more than 170 flights disrupted in a week in Vilnius and almost 14,000 passengers affected.
Reiteration turns the episodic into a pattern: state actors exploit gaps in the norm (civil balloons, meteorological assumptions, smuggling) to degrade the continuity of European civil aviation and test the elasticity of ROE and allied cohesion without crossing explicit thresholds of article 5. Lithuania, in fact, is studying consultations under article 4, and has hinted that the closure could extend to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, raising the economic-logistical vector of the pulse.
Hybrid war as a framework. Vilnius is clear about this, and describes the phenomenon as a psychological operation aimed at disrupting daily life, testing NATO-EU synchrony and normalizing aggression (of low lethality, of course) as noise permanent. The background signal (at no point is Moscow explicitly named) fits into the hybrid war repertoire: discreet sabotage, information manipulation, low signal intrusion, erosion of trust and critical infrastructure, in conjunction with the war in Ukraine and under the plausible protection of Belarus.
Plus: the closure of borders is accompanied by tougher criminal penalties against smuggling and coordination with Poland and Latvia to shield the eastern border as a strategic unit, given the calculation that firmness, the earlier, will define how much the enemy will dare later.
Imagen | LITHUANIAN MINISTRY OF DEFENSE
In WorldOfSoftware | Europe has decided to take action against Moscow’s hybrid war. So Germany has started hunting for Russian drones
In WorldOfSoftware | The Spanish invention that simplifies the hunt for Europe’s biggest threat: how to detect the arrival of drones in a matter of seconds
