Two Russian warplanes briefly entered Lithuanian airspace in October 2025, the latest in a string of incursions over NATO nations’ territory along the alliance’s eastern flank. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda called the incursion “a blatant breach of international law and territorial integrity of Lithuania.”
In an October 23 post on the social media platform X, Nausėda wrote: “Once again, it confirms the importance of strengthening European air defence readiness.” The Russian planes appeared over Lithuanian skies on the same day that Nausėda attended a European Council summit in Brussels where leaders “endorsed a plan to ensure that Europe can defend itself against an outside attack by the end of the decade. The plan is dubbed Readiness 2030,” according to The Associated Press.
The European Commission’s Defence Readiness Roadmap is a four-pillared plan to deter Russian aggression more effectively by 2030. The plan includes creating multidomain defenses against drones, missiles, planes and space threats while allowing multinational collaboration among European states to buy defense materials. NATO, too, has responded to Russian-linked sabotage in the Baltic Sea with stepped-up aerial and maritime patrols.
About 6 p.m. local time on October 23, two SU-30 multirole fighter warplanes and an IL-78 refueling tanker entered Lithuanian airspace for about 18 seconds. The Russian planes may have been conducting refueling exercises in the nearby Russian territory of Kaliningrad, according to The AP.
Since September, Russia has repeatedly entered NATO airspace with warplanes and drones, prompting European leaders to characterize Moscow’s behavior as a type of “hybrid war,” in the words of Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen after her country’s airports and military bases were swamped and briefly shuttered by Russian-linked drones in September. “I hope that everybody recognizes now that there is a hybrid war and one day it’s Poland, the other day it’s Denmark, and next week it will probably be somewhere else that we see sabotage, or we see drones flying,” Frederiksen told reporters on October 1, according to The AP. France later seized a Russian “shadow fleet” ship off its coast that officials suspected of launching the Danish attack. Earlier in September, drones invaded Polish airspace. NATO warplanes have scrambled each time with the Lithuanian incident drawing two Spanish NATO fighter jets to monitor the Russian activity.
Since September, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and Norway have been the focus of highly publicized drone or warplane incursions. Just days before the Lithuanian incident, a Russian spy plane was intercepted by two Norwegian F-35s in Norwegian airspace on October 21, the second incursion in the Nordic country’s air space within a week.
Since the first incursions of Russian drones into Poland, NATO members have reported 38 incidents, according to the U.S.-based Center for European Policy Analysis, Reuters reported in October. NATO’s top commander said on the same day that a unified NATO response has appeared to deter Moscow’s more blatant maneuvers. “We’ll have a deterrent effect, but they’re going to continue to try to move and take hybrid approaches to how they challenge the alliance,” said Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, according to the wire service.