Lithuania has evacuation plans but 'will not surrender', PM tells BBC
Lithuania's prime minister has said his country has prepared evacuation plans to deal with a range of security scenarios, while insisting that it "will not surrender" if it is attacked.
Speaking to the BBC's Newsnight programme, Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius said Lithuanians feel "constantly threatened" by Russia, pointing to incidents such as drones entering the country's airspace.
He said that if Lithuania were attacked, "we will fight back... we will engage". He added that the authorities had drawn up plans for "a variety of scenarios", and gave the example of moving elderly citizens out of cities "smoothly" while avoiding traffic jams. He did not set out the remaining scenarios in detail.
"We're thinking about a variety of scenarios, not all of them are being discussed very much publicly," he told the programme. "We face concrete threats, not on a daily basis, but we're experiencing them and it's a true reality for us."
Lithuania is a member of the Nato alliance and shares a land border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Nato is believed to have several thousand troops stationed in the Baltic state, including United States and German forces.
Washington is currently reviewing its troop deployments in Europe. However, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said on Tuesday that a new rotation of US troops was on its way to the country.
Last week, Nato fighter pilots shot down a drone that entered Lithuanian airspace. Over the past year, Lithuania has reported numerous incidents which it describes as "hybrid attacks" and blames on neighbouring Belarus, a close ally of Russia.
Late on Monday night, flights were disrupted at Lithuania's main airport in the capital, Vilnius, because of what the airport operator called a "hybrid attack carried out by Belarus". The disruption involved objects that appeared to resemble the shape of balloons. The president's chief adviser, Deividas Matulionis, said on Tuesday that it was not yet clear whether the objects were in fact balloons.
The prime minister also said the United Kingdom needed "a shift in the mindset" in its approach to defence, while noting that Lithuania was "closer to the border and closer to [the] threat".
The three Baltic states — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — have repeatedly raised concerns about their security since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. All three are Nato members, and the alliance has strengthened its presence along its eastern flank in response. Lithuania has also increased its own defence spending in recent years.
Incidents involving drones and unidentified objects in the region have added to those concerns, though officials have cautioned that some cases remain under investigation and that not all have been conclusively attributed.
