VILNIUS (Reuters) -Lithuania’s Vilnius airport resumed operations on Thursday evening, after closing for more than an hour due to smugglers’ balloons again appearing on radar, Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre said.
Last month, the Baltic republic closed its border crossings with Belarus in response to airspace disruptions by weather balloons coming in from Belarus, but reopened them earlier on Thursday.
“As the Prime Minister has said, if hybrid attacks of this nature continue, all border checkpoints may be closed again,” a spokesperson for Lithuanian premier Inga Ruginiene said in a statement.
Lithuania has said the balloons, which have caused closures at Lithuanian airports, are flown by smugglers transporting contraband cigarettes and blames Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko for not stopping the practice, calling it a form of “hybrid attack”.
Lukashenko has called the border closure a “crazy scam”, accusing the West of fighting a hybrid war against Belarus and Russia, ushering in a new era of barbed-wire division.
Air traffic incident reports had decreased in recent weeks, prior to Thursday’s closure of Vilnius airport.
(Reporting by Andrius Sytas in Vilnius, writing by Anne Kauranen in Helsinki; Editing by Toby Chopra)
