After the fatal crash of a cargo plane in Lithuania, the criminal trail and external intervention envisaged

It's necessary ” refrain from drawing hasty conclusions” for Lithuania. But the questions are well justified this Monday, November 25. In the morning, a DHL cargo plane, departing from Germany, crashed near Vilnius airport, after attempting an emergency landing. A Spanish crew member died. And the reasons for this crash are currently unknown.

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On the one hand, Germany does not exclude the criminal trail. “We have to ask ourselves (…) whether it was an accident or, like last week, again a hybrid incident”said the Minister of Foreign Affairs, referring to the recent rupture of two telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea for which sabotage is not excluded.

“Recently, we have had several times in Europe hybrid attacks (…) on individual people, infrastructure underwater or on land”continued Annalena Baerbock, during a press point on the sidelines of a G7 meeting in Fiuggi, near Rome.

“We see an increasingly aggressive Russia”

So-called hybrid actions aim to harm a country's political institutions or influence its public opinion through non-military means, such as sabotage or computer attacks. Since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, several European officials believe that Russia is leading a “hybrid warfare” against Western countries allied with kyiv with the aim of destabilizing them.

On the other hand, Lithuania has also expressed doubts. Darius Jauniskis, the head of the country's intelligence services, said he was “premature to associate (the crash) with anything”while indicating that he cannot “exclude the possibility of a terrorist act”.

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“We have warned that such things are possible, we see an increasingly aggressive Russia, (…) but we cannot yet (…) point fingers” anyone, declared Darius Jauniskis, while the Minister of Defense indicated that for the moment there was no “no signs or evidence to suggest that this was sabotage or a terrorist act”.

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.

“DHL affair”

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. This is Russian military intelligence services”declared Kestutis Budrys.

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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 which caught fire in a center of the carrier DHL in Leipzig in July.

For now, in Lithuania, investigators have gone to the hospital to question the injured crew members, while the plane's black boxes must be analyzed to determine if they are “a technical error, a pilot error or something else”.