Smuggling drone found in a Pasvalys forest, months after crashing

At around 13:06 local time (10:06 UTC) on September 16, 2026, forest workers clearing storm damage near Keneliai village, Pasvalys district, found a crashed drone in the woods. According to LRT, the drone was overgrown with grass, and officials assessed from the vegetation that it had crashed months earlier - long enough that no one had noticed or reported it in the meantime.

Giedrius Bronušas, director of the State Forests Service's Panevėžys regional division, said the drone measured roughly 3 meters across, per LRT; 15min.lt separately reported it as about 2 meters long with a 3.5-meter wingspan. Both accounts describe clear wings and a fuselage still intact despite its condition.

Police called it a contraband drone, not a military type

Darius Buta of the National Crisis Management Centre said the aircraft did not resemble a Russian Shahed or Gerbera-type drone. Emergency plan "Skydas," Lithuania's standard security-response protocol, was activated as a precaution: anti-terrorism unit Aras and Lithuanian military personnel were sent to the forest to secure the site and rule out explosives before the device was moved.

By the evening of the same day, per Respublika.lt, police confirmed their assessment: this was a simple drone built for contraband smuggling. It carried no explosives and no military capability. Plan "Skydas" was then stood down.

An undetected crash, similar to an earlier Polish find

Pasvalys joins a pattern AirVeto has tracked elsewhere on the region's borders: a drone that came down without being noticed, only surfacing when someone stumbled on the wreckage much later. A Gerbera-type drone sat undetected at a lignite mine near Gałczyce, Poland for six months before it was found. Lithuanian officials say the Pasvalys drone is a civilian smuggling craft, not a military one - a different category from Gałczyce's - but it shares the same underlying gap: a crash that produced no alert, no search, and no report until a chance discovery on the ground.

No official account gives a precise date for when the drone came down - only the discovery date and the estimate that months had passed - so AirVeto is not publishing a wind reconstruction for this page. A wind-drift estimate needs a known time window to model against, and none exists here.