On the night of Wednesday 29 July 2026, officers at VSAT's Gintaro Žagunio Border Post, monitoring the section near Norviliškės village, picked up sounds associated with flying drones coming from the Belarusian side. They confirmed the acoustic detection with thermal-imaging cameras, which showed multiple unmanned aircraft in the sky at once. Border guards blocked the likely violation area and immediately deployed their anti-drone equipment. The crossing point lies inside the Dieveniškės Loop, a section of Lithuanian territory surrounded on all sides by Belarus.
Three separate aircraft, found across two searches and two shifts
Searching the area where the drones might have gone down after losing control, officers found the first downed aircraft in forest near Norviliškės village, about fifty metres from the state border, with two bundles wrapped in black polyethylene film attached to it. Continuing the search, a few hundred metres further on - already near Daulėnai village - they found a second drone, also carrying two bundles. A third aircraft, fitted with a GPS transmitter, was found in woodland near Norviliškės after daybreak, by the next shift of officers; it too had carried two bundles from Belarus.
Officers brought all three aircraft and their cargo to the Gintaro Žagunio Border Post for inspection. Each pair of bundles held two cardboard boxes of cigarettes - six boxes in total, holding 3,000 packs of NZ Gold SuperSlims bearing Belarusian excise stamps. At full Lithuanian tax liability, VSAT valued the cargo at €16,380. A pretrial investigation for illegal possession of excise-taxable goods was opened at VSAT's Varėna Border District, led by a prosecutor from the Vilnius Regional Prosecutor's Office.
A different Dieveniškės Loop incident from the one already in AirVeto's archive
This is a separate event from the 3-metre fixed-wing drone intercepted in the Dieveniškės Loop on 22 June 2026, which involved a single aircraft with a parachute system and no cargo. The Loop's geography - Lithuanian territory bordered by Belarus on all sides - makes it a recurring crossing point independent of any single incident. By VSAT's count, the service had landed 38 contraband drones from Belarus in under seven months of 2026 by the time of this intercept; the full-year totals for the two prior years were 59 (2025) and 54 (2024).
A full record of border and airspace incidents over Lithuanian territory is at Dronai Lietuvoje. The full incident archive is at incident archive.