BBC: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whenever the wind blows northwest from Belarus, Lithuania braces for problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s when giant white balloons are launched across the border, crates of cheap cigarettes dangling beneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the past 10 weeks, the illicit balloon traffic has already forced Lithuania’s main airport into shutdown 15 times, stranding or delaying thousands of travellers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On one occasion the airspace was closed completely for 11 hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the government here is sure it is dealing with something far more hostile than smugglers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It says the balloons have been “weaponised” in an act of hybrid warfare by Belarus, Russia’s closest ally. It is happening just as Moscow’s own shadow war on Europe is escalating again with a wave of arson and sabotage attacks that officials link to Russian intelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BBC: Whenever the wind blows northwest from Belarus, Lithuania braces for problems. That’s when giant white balloons are launched across the border, crates of cheap cigarettes dangling beneath. Over the past 10 weeks, the illicit balloon traffic has already forced Lithuania’s main airport into shutdown 15 times, stranding or delaying thousands of travellers. On one occasion the airspace was closed completely for 11 hours. But the government here is sure it is dealing with something far more hostile than smugglers. It says the balloons have been “weaponised” in an act of hybrid warfare by Belarus, Russia’s closest ally. It is… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53340,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53339"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53341,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53339\/revisions\/53341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/53340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}