Are Poland and the Baltic states allowing Ukraine to use their airspace for drone attacks on St. Petersburg, Russia? A drone that crashed in Lithuania on Sunday morning while Ukraine was launching a massive drone attack on an oil terminal, a logistics hub and a data center has been identified as Ukrainian, not only by Lithuanian authorities but also by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. The latter blamed Russia for its ending up in Lithuania, despite the fact that Lithuania doesn’t even border Russia, except Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave.

The line promoted by Heorhy Tykhy, spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, and retailed throughout Western media, is that this was a mere “incident” of a drone going astray. “We regret the incident that occurred this morning in Lithuanian airspace, which may have resulted from Russian electronic warfare diverting drones during an operation against legitimate military targets in Russia,” Tykhy posted on X. “We apologize for any disruption, risks, and concern this may have caused.”

The Belarus-based Military Summary Channel on YouTube, citing Russian and Ukrainian military blogs, reported that as many as half of the 520 drones in the October 17-18 attack approached St. Petersburg from the Gulf of Finland after crossing through the airspace of the Baltic countries. As a result, the Russians were unable to intercept them until they were almost upon the city. According to Russian Telegram channels, one of the fires set by the Ukrainian drone swarm was at Gazprom’s Portovaya LNG Terminal on the northern coast of the Gulf of Finland adjacent to the head of the currently non-operational Nord Stream 1 pipeline.