The Prime Minister of Lithuania said the country will seek action through international judicial institutions in response to Belarus’ ongoing use of smuggler balloons, which continue to drift into Lithuanian territory.

According to LRT on November 27, Inga Ruginienė explained that several ministries are now collecting evidence and evaluating the possibility of filing a case with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the risks and damage caused by these balloon flights. Over recent months, Vilnius Airport has been forced to shut down multiple times because of them.

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As the UK paper The Telegraph reports, the balloons, which contain GPS trackers and around £3,000 worth of cigarettes each, are released high into the air in Belarus before floating across the border into Lithuania. Moscow is using Belarus to unleash these swarms of balloons into Lithuania to create air-traffic chaos and find weak spots on Nato’s eastern flank.

These smugglers have a more sinister goal than profit: creating air traffic chaos on Nato’s eastern flank, in what Lithuania says is a new phase of Moscow’s hybrid war on the West.

Since October the Baltic region’s second-largest airport, in Vilnius, has been forced to close nine times due to the swarms of balloons, which also reached neighbouring Latvia for the first time this week.

There have even been reports of balloon launches from Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave sandwiched between Lithuania, Poland and key Russian ally Belarus.

Lithuania also warned that the balloon launches pose a “serious” threat to Nato security on its eastern flank, and were being “perpetrated in the broader context of Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine.”

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