Russian drone shot down over Lithuania, Washington accuses Moscow of assassination plots

Two Italian fighter jets, engaged in the Nato mission to monitor Baltic skies, shot down a drone that had entered Lithuania’s airspace. The episode occurred a few hours before the arrival in the country of Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, who confirmed that the downed aircraft was “probably Russian.” The two fighter jets are part of the Italian contingent deployed on the eastern flank of the Atlantic Alliance.

The episode occurred on the same day that, on the other side of the Atlantic, the US Department of Justice unsealed charges against five people who, according to the indictment, were working for Russian intelligence services. The charges, announced on September 15, describe a network that allegedly attempted to pay individuals in the United States and elsewhere to conduct preparatory surveillance activity and to carry out targeted killings. The same indictment also lists plots involving acts of terrorism against civilian and military infrastructure in European countries aligned, or perceived as aligned, with Ukraine.

According to the Associated Press, based on the indictment, three of the defendants allegedly recruited a Venezuelan national residing in Brooklyn to surveil and kill a Russian dissident living in the Washington area. Available sources do not specify the status of any arrests or the current stage of the legal proceedings.

The picture widens to a third front. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of targeting his presidential aircraft with drones on at least two recent occasions, attributing one of the episodes to the aircraft’s presence in Moldova at a specific moment. Available sources do not, at this time, allow for a complete reconstruction of the timeline of the episodes cited by the Ukrainian president.

On the ground, meanwhile, Russian attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine continue unabated. Five people died in a drone strike on a scheduled bus in the Nikopol district. A passenger train traveling from Kyiv to Mykolaiv was hit by the Russians: passengers and crew were evacuated before impact, and no injuries were reported in that episode. During the night between September 15 and 16, Russia attacked Ukraine with 80 drones, of which more than 60 were intercepted by Ukrainian air defense, according to Ukrainska Pravda. In the Sviatoshynskyi district of Kyiv, a fire at several warehouses caused at least one injury.

Three separate events — the downing of a drone in the skies of a Nato country, formal charges by Washington against a network linked to Moscow, daily attacks against the Ukrainian civilian population — converge on the same day to form a picture of tension that simultaneously touches the eastern flank of the Atlantic Alliance, US territory and Ukrainian cities.

Among available sources, there are no official Russian statements in response either to the downing of the drone in Lithuania or to the US Department of Justice’s charges. Minister Crosetto used a cautious term — “probable” — to describe the origin of the downed aircraft, while the US indictment lists specific names and circumstances, leaving open, according to available sources, certain procedural aspects of the case.