A drone alert blasted on my phone – we had to take shelter. This is the new reality on Nato’s eastern flank |
A couple of weeks ago, I was walking through the streets of Vilnius, on my way to give a talk on geopolitics to a group of visiting Austrian business and academic leaders. It was a pleasant spring day: people were out and about, cafe tables were set outside – all the familiar tranquillity of a European capital that has grown used to talking about war in theory, but not to expecting it overhead.
Then an alarm blasted from my phone. Not a polite notification. Lithuania’s emergency alert system is designed to be impossible to ignore. The first message warned of a possible drone threat. The next was sharper: air danger – seek shelter.
I kept walking, working my contacts in government, trying to understand how real the threat was, where the drone might be, and whether Vilnius was actually at risk. Around me, the mood shifted. People did not panic (Lithuanians rarely do), but faces tightened. Some walked faster while others carried on after a glance at their screens.
Still, for the first time in our modern history, we all suddenly needed to take shelter. When I reached my destination, the meeting had been moved from a conference room to the cellar of a local library. It was cramped with the Austrian guests I was supposed to brief, and with local Lithuanians who had found the same place as a shelter. So I began my lecture on geopolitics underground not as a metaphor, but as a fact.
The working assumption about what triggered the alert is that a Ukrainian drone, aimed at........