A few minutes after midnight, the sky over Lithuania stopped being a metaphor for security and became a workplace. An unmanned aircraft entered the country's airspace, and a NATO fighter jet shot it down near the village of Pratkūnai in the Kaišiadorys district, not far from Kaunas, the country's second-largest city. Lithuanian authorities immediately sent military police and other services to the site to find the debris and determine what type of drone it was.

What citizens received was not a press release but a text message. Lithuania declared a yellow level of air danger for Vilnius and its surroundings, as well as for the Trakai and Elektrėnai areas, and the warnings landed directly on mobile phones. Vilnius airport temporarily restricted operations. When the danger was declared over, the warning was withdrawn and flights resumed. The whole operation lasted less than one night.

Where the drone came from - and whose it is

According to preliminary information, the aircraft most likely entered from Belarusian territory. But that is not the same as knowing whose it is. The head of the National Crisis Management Centre, Vilmantas Vitkauskas, said experts have yet to establish the characteristics of the downed drone, its possible flight path and the purpose of the flight. Services are now collecting the debris to determine the model and origin.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda confirmed the shoot-down and thanked allied forces. "The drone that just entered Lithuanian airspace was destroyed by NATO fighter jets. I thank the allied personnel for the swift response", he said. According to the Ministry of Defence, Lithuanian armed forces responded along with Italian pilots deployed in the Baltic air policing mission.

Two days ago the alarm turned out to be a flock of birds

Just two days earlier, on 13 September, Lithuania had already scrambled a NATO jet and temporarily closed Vilnius airport over objects suspected of being drones. A later check showed the radar had in fact registered a flock of birds. That is the detail that says more than the incident itself: when a system is wound so tight that a flock of birds scrambles fighter jets, the question is no longer whether there will be an error, but when.

The Baltic air policing mission has patrolled over Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia ever since they joined the Alliance in 2004. For two decades that was routine and never made the news. In recent months, drone incidents have become a serious security problem on NATO's eastern flank, and the routine has turned into something people receive as an alert on their phone.

The number is what opens up the real picture. The mission's fighters have downed stray drones before - over Estonia in May, over Latvia in June and again in August. With last night's, that is four aircraft shot down over the Baltics in less than five months. When something repeats four times, the word "incident" slowly stops applying.

Who answers if one night the error runs the other way? The Balkans know this scene by heart: everything is under control until it is not, and then everyone remembers the warnings had been there for weeks. The difference is that here every response takes minutes and drags the whole Alliance along with it.