Month: October 2025

• Lithuania said on Sunday that balloons flying from Belarus are forcing airport shutdowns.
• Officials said the balloons are likely for smuggling cigarettes, but still pose an air safety threat.
• Lithuania’s prime minister has blamed Minsk for allowing the balloons to “run wild.”

Balloons flying in from Belarus have prompted officials in Lithuania to close local airports for a third night in a row.

Authorities said in a statement on Sunday evening that the airspace around Vilnius Airport had been temporarily suspended, affecting some 47 flights from 9:42 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. the next morning.

“According to initial information, the decision regarding airspace restrictions was made due to balloons flying in the direction of Vilnius Airport,” the statement said.

The incident is the latest in a string of reports this week from Lithuania, a NATO member, that helium-filled balloons have been entering its territory from the Belarusian border.

In a statement on Saturday, Lithuanian Prime Minister Inga Ruginiene said a “large group of smuggling meteorological balloons” had been launched from Belarus and into her country.

Another airport, in Kaunas, had to be closed as a result, she said.

The prime minister added that the balloons are likely used for smuggling cigarettes, but blamed the Russia-aligned leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, for allowing them to “run wild.”

In a separate statement on Sunday, Rugiene said that Lithuania was temporarily closing its borders with Belarus as its security council meets on Monday to discuss next steps.

Lithuania has been dealing with balloons from Belarus for some time. In September 2024, border authorities said 250 balloons had crossed over in a single month.

However, the country has been raising the alarm more frequently over such incidents over the last year, as the Baltic states report repeated airspace violations from Russia, which counts Belarus among its closest allies.

Lithuanian authorities said this week’s first balloons started showing up days before and had already prompted an earlier airport closure. On Wednesday, local officials issued a statement saying that they detected “several hundred markers” in a single night that could have been smuggling balloons.

These are often equipped with GPS trackers and SIM cards that allow their cargo to be tracked, the statement said.

“This year, more than 100 people have been arrested for air smuggling, 20 of whom have already been convicted,” it added.

The statement also called on tech companies and defense contractors to pitch solutions for tracking and destroying such balloons.

More broadly, European NATO has been on edge after a series of drone incursions over Poland in September, many of which were said to involve Russian Gerberas flying through Belarus.

Other NATO allies, such as Denmark, have reported drone incursions over their airports in the weeks since.

Balloon incursions have happened elsewhere, too. In the summer of 2024, South Korea accused North Korea of floating over hundreds of trash-filled balloons, spreading garbage across the greater Seoul region as a gray warfare tactic.

The press team for Lukashenko’s office did not respond to a request for comment sent outside local business hours by Business Insider.

• Russia’s war on inflation could be blinding policymakers to a far bigger problem — stalled growth.
• Economic growth depends on labor productivity and employment, but both are under strain.
• A top Russian banker said the country needs to attract skilled professionals from abroad to stay competitive.

Russia’s policymakers are so fixated on inflation that they are missing the bigger picture, one of the country’s most powerful bankers said last week.

“We’ve been so focused on fighting inflation lately that we’ve somewhat forgotten about economic growth. Without economic growth, there will be nothing. We won’t be able to solve social problems or anything else,” German Gref, the CEO of Sberbank, told Russia’s State Council on Demographic and Family Policy on Thursday.

“All economic growth depends on two factors: labor productivity and the number of people employed,” said Gref, who was Russia’s economy minister from 2000 to 2007.

But both of those pillars are under pressure.

“In principle, it is achievable if we begin actively using artificial intelligence, robotics, and all other new technologies, but this requires significant investment and a major commitment to education, science, and so on,” Gref said.

However, “this will be difficult to achieve given the capital shortage and the high interest rates we have today,” he added.

Gref’s comments came before Russia’s central bank cut its key interest rate by 50 basis points to 16.5% on Friday.

Business leaders have been pushing back against the central bank’s tight monetary policy, arguing that sky-high borrowing costs are choking lending and investment. The bank has defended its stance, saying high rates are necessary to curb inflation, which stood around 6.4% in the third quarter.

Gref projected that Russia’s GDP growth rate over the next two years would hover between 1% and 1.5%, and that this year’s growth could slump to just 0.8% — sharply lower than Russia’s 4.3% GDP expansion recorded last year.

Earlier this month, a top Russian business leader warned that the country’s economy has slowed to a pace that could jeopardize its ability to cover surging defense, security, and social costs.

A shrinking workforce

Russia is facing a deepening demographic crisis, with a looming labor shortage that could reach nearly 11 million workers by 2030, Anton Kotyakov, Russia’s labor minister, said in July.

The war in Ukraine has only worsened the problem, as battlefield casualties and a mass exodus of young professionals deplete the country’s working-age population.

Russia has leaned on foreign workers, mainly from Central Asia, to fill labor gaps, but Gref said the country is “engaging in negative selection.”

“We mostly attract very low-skilled labor, while we ourselves are losing highly qualified specialists,” he said, urging Moscow to actively attract skilled professionals from abroad and offer incentives for foreign graduates to stay in Russia.

“It is a matter of national security and the survival of the country,” he said.

Russia’s demographic squeeze is already distorting its economy, keeping unemployment low at around 2.1% and fueling inflationary pressure through rapid wage growth.

Businesses are already struggling to cope. Employers are increasingly hiring retirees and teenagers to plug staffing gaps in an economy distorted by wartime spending.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made population growth a national priority, calling it a matter of “ethnic survival” and urging women to have as many as eight children.

In 2024, births in Russia fell to 1.22 million — the lowest since 1999 — while deaths rose to 1.82 million, according to government data.