On Tuesday evening, takeoffs and landings at Vilnius Airport were suspended for over an hour due to the threat posed by smuggled meteorological balloons launched from Belarus, reported the operator of Lithuania's state airports 'Lietuvos oro uostai', according to LETA citing BNS.
Traffic at the airport was stopped from 20:30 to 21:45.
Two arriving flights were redirected to other airports—one to Kaunas, the other to Riga; however, after the airspace over Vilnius Airport was reopened, both aircraft, which had a total of 215 passengers on board, headed to Vilnius and landed there. Two more flights were delayed.
At the end of January, Vilnius Airport was forced to suspend takeoffs and landings three times due to balloons used for smuggling cigarettes, affecting 1,700 passengers.
Such incidents occurred frequently in the fall and early December, but since mid-December, after the visit of U.S. President Donald Trump's special envoy John Cole to Belarus, their number has significantly decreased.
After the visit, Cole stated that Belarusian authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko promised to stop launching smuggled balloons towards Lithuania.
Lithuanian officials consider the launch of smuggled balloons a hybrid attack from Minsk.
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