Baltics, Poland, Finland, Norway agree on ‘drone wall’ to protect borders

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Regional countries have agreed to create a “drone wall” to protect their external borders using unmanned aerial vehicles, Lithuanian Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė has said.

She made the remarks after a meeting on Friday in Latvia with her counterparts from the other two Baltic states, Poland, Finland, and Norway.

“This is a completely new thing – a drone wall stretching from Norway to Poland – and the goal is to use drones and other technologies to protect our borders […] against provocations from unfriendly countries and to prevent smuggling,” Bilotaitė told BNS.

To create such a “drone wall”, countries would use UAVs to monitor their border area, as well as anti-drone systems to stop drones from hostile countries being used for smuggling and provocations.

According to Bilotaitė, Lithuania has already made plans to step up the protection of its border with the help of drones. Lithuania’s State Border Guard Service has recently established a UAV unit and is in the process of acquiring additional drones and anti-drone systems, she stressed.

Now, the countries will assess what “homework” they need to do and then, with the help of experts, national authorities will draw up a plan to implement the “drone wall”.

The Lithuanian minister could not say when the idea would be implemented but noted that the “drone wall” could be created using EU funds.

The ministers also agreed to organise joint evacuation drills in the countries involved, Bilotaitė said.

“We agreed to hold regional drills to ensure the evacuation of the population, to see how our institutions are prepared to work, to interact with each other, what our capacity is to accommodate people, what the capacity of other countries is, whether they are ready to receive a certain number of our people,” the interior minister said.

“We still have a lot of questions; we need to look at all those algorithms. Drills would be very valuable as we would look at things, evaluate them and we would strengthen our preparedness,” she added.

Lithuania’s preparedness is currently being assessed by an EU evacuation mission, which is expected to make its recommendations in June.