A plane crashes in Lithuania: “We see an increasingly aggressive Russia”… why could Moscow be suspected of this crash?

Very early Monday, November 25, around 5:30 a.m., a cargo plane crashed in a residential area near Vilnius, Lithuania. On board there were four crew members, one of them, a Spanish man, did not survive. “The plane was supposed to land at Vilnius airport and crashed a few kilometers from the airport,” Renatas Pozela, head of the fire and rescue service, told reporters. The other three were found safe and were hospitalized.

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Cargo plane crashes in residential area in Lithuania, at least one dead according to provisional report

According to a press release from DHL Germany, a Swift Air plane, operated by a partner on behalf of DHL and which linked Leipzig (Germany) to the Lithuanian capital, “made an emergency landing approximately one kilometer” from the Vilnius airport. According to Ausra Rutkauskiene, a company manager in Lithuania, the plane was carrying “consignments from several customers” and not just one.

A terrorist act not ruled out

The circumstances are not yet known but an investigation has been opened. The Lithuanian authorities wished to remain cautious regarding the nature of the accident, while not ruling out a terrorist act. “It is premature to associate (the crash) with anything,” Darius Jauniskis, the head of the country’s intelligence services, told reporters. “We are working with our foreign partners to obtain all possible information. We cannot rule out the possibility of a terrorist act,” he confirmed.

Although he did not wish to accuse anyone, Darius Jauniskis mentioned the case of Russia, a country with which Lithuania shares a border of several hundred kilometers. “We warned that such things were possible, we see an increasingly aggressive Russia, […] but we can't yet […] pointing the finger at anyone.

According to Defense Minister Laurynas Kasciunas, there are so far “no signs or evidence to suggest that this is sabotage or a terrorist act.” Investigators went to the hospital to question the three injured crew members, while the plane's black boxes must be analyzed to determine if it was “a technical error, a pilot error or something else,” he added, specifying that the investigation “could last about a week.”

Russia in the sights of several countries

An accident which is reminiscent of events which have taken place in recent weeks and months. At the beginning of November, several people were arrested in Lithuania and Poland in a case of incendiary packages sent by plane to different European countries, the traces of which could, according to several capitals, lead to Russia. This summer, packages containing incendiary devices were found in DHL warehouses in Germany and Britain, where they caught fire. In Poland, a package also set fire to a DHL truck, according to the daily Gazeta Wyborcza. An adviser to the Lithuanian president for national security then attributed this operation to Russia.

“We need to neutralize and dismantle the source, and we know who is behind these operations. It is the Russian military intelligence services,” Kestutis Budrys said. German intelligence had previously also pointed the finger at the Russian Federation. On October 14 during a hearing in the Bundestag, the head of German Domestic Intelligence (BfV) Thomas Haldenwang openly accused Moscow of being behind the “DHL affair”, referring to the case of a package that had caught fire at a center of the carrier DHL in Leipzig in July.