Lithuanian minister: “Nato is effectively at war with Russia”

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1:00Here in a moment my interview with the Lithuanian Defence Minister on exactly what he knows about the drone's origin, payload and target. But this incident comes as politicians across Europe are warning of Russia's increasingly reckless and dangerous behaviour, as the EU Commission Chief put it today. And as you'll hear in this interview, it prompts a very striking assertion from this Minister of Defence of a country that borders Russia and is both a member of the EU and of NATO, a striking assertion about how Europe and NATO should view the current provocations. My first question to Robertus Konos, though, what exactly happened last night?

1:38Last night, drone incursion was from Belarus. The erection of the drone was to the middle of Lithuania. Immediately, our armed forces detected this air threat. NATO air defence mission was activated. Italian pilots started immediately intercepted drone in the middle of Lithuania. Reaction was timely. We're grateful to Italian pilots for rapid response and decisions they made. Drone was shooted down and now we will study debris and we'll try to understand who sent this drone, what was the purpose, direction, and after that we will be able probably to send more information to all NATO partners. But just to be very clear, this was an armed drone, was it?

2:34Looks like yes. Do you know armed with what? What sort of payload it was carrying? No, at the moment, no. The main idea is to collect that data, to understand what target was and who sent that drone. We have some suspicious, but let's collect all data and then make a clear statement. This drone was shot down by Italian jets, as you've been saying. In a sense, it's a successful operation, but it's also, I mean, scrambling fighter jets to deal with a single drone. It feels like it's a bit of a mismatch in defence terms. And, you know, obviously, as far as Ukraine is concerned, they deal with hundreds of drones pretty much every day, every night.

3:24They're not defending against the drones by having squadrons of fighter jets in the air. Do you think you and the other frontline states need to think about the sort of anti-drone technology and capability that Ukraine has? We are working on this capability together with Ukraine, together with other NATO countries. Of course, we must build a single layer of anti-drone capability. First of all, connect all possible detection capabilities to a single system, not only from radars, but from acoustic sensors, from cameras, from other equipments. Also, kinetic capabilities, interceptor drones. But we are working on this.

4:14We are learning from Ukraine. There is no silver bullet. Specific technology will answer all questions. We must use also standard equipment, if I may say so, like jets, because it really works. Unfortunately, Ukraine is at war. They deployed all military capabilities around the country. In Lithuania, in other countries, we are in peace mode, well, as we understand it. So we are not able to deploy armed forces around Lithuania. You will be aware that, you know, this latest incident, and I know you've been very careful not to call out the Russians yet, but it fits into a pattern where lots of people, and maybe you subscribe to this idea, feel that Moscow is provoking, particularly the frontline countries, but not just them in NATO.

5:11I mean, you know, it's gone as far as Germany. People are concerned about what the Russians are doing, and there is a strategic question that people are asking as to whether NATO needs to be much more muscular in its response to what Russia is up to. in what people are calling this hybrid war. What's your view? NATO was built to protect us from a standard war as we understand it. But when we speak about hybrid attacks, when we speak about those gray zones, we need to respond fast. Unfortunately, we are in war with Russia because Russia already making attack in Germany, in Leipzig, all the attacks also related to Russia.

6:05And nobody wants war. Nobody wants war. But in some cases, trying to de-escalate, providing escalation. And now Russia escalating because NATO and Europe stepping back. It's enough. I mean, we need to stand still. and move even further to show that we have muscles. We can protect our people and all Europe and we will protect. So we need to agree because if we try to work alone, we'll lose. We are aliens. We are partners. We want to live in peace. So we should show Moscow that we will protect our nation and we will not tolerate further escalation. Minister, among the interesting things that you said there, one of them stood out to me, and that was you saying, we are at war with Russia.

7:05That's how you view it. We are attacked by Russia. This is true. Does that mean you feel that you are at war with Russia, essentially? We can't discuss what that really mean. But when we see drones with explosives in Leipzig, how we should call it, When we see drone incursion from Belarus, how we should call it, burning factories in Baltic states, Poland, how we should call it. I believe we should stand firm and name things how it looks. Yeah. Well, and one of the other things that you said was that de-escalation can be escalation in the sense that it can presumably give Moscow the sense that it can carry on pushing, it can carry on provoking.

7:50I don't know what you think about this, and maybe he has the luxury of no longer being in office, but Gabrielys Landsberg, the former Lithuanian foreign minister, spoke to an earlier edition of News Hour today to say, you know, that NATO is in denial and that perhaps what NATO should say is if one more drone crosses into NATO territory, you won't have electricity in St. Petersburg. If another drone enters into NATO territory, you won't have electricity for 24 hours in Moscow. I don't know if you would subscribe to such a muscular response, but do you think these are the sorts of conversations that NATO needs now to start having?

8:31I think we as a NATO, all countries need to find the right way to respond. And in some cases, it's not enough just to send diplomats from countries and so on. If we continue stepping back, Russia will continue to move forward. Lithuania were occupied by Russia for 50 years. We understand how Russia works. They are not looking for peace. They are looking for new territories. They are looking for new escalation. And if we will let them, they will proceed. That was Robertus Konas speaking to me from Lithuania, where he is the Minister of Defence.

9:14Let's head from Lithuania, where investigations are continuing into whether the incursion was definitely from a Russian military drone, to Ukraine, where there are no such doubts about what's happening. There, the head of the country's state post office has told the BBC that Russia is deliberately targeting his branches and the delivery vans that the post office rely on. Igor Smelyansky said this was because his staff provided a lifeline for millions left isolated by the war. Our diplomatic correspondent, James Landale, has been out on the road in Ukraine, meeting some of the postmen and women who deliver more than just parcels.

9:54So that was your desk? Yeah. For two years, Katerina Maronich ran the village post office here in Lukasheva, near Zaporydzha in southeastern Ukraine. It was here she rebuilt her life after losing her home and her husband during the full-scale invasion. But then earlier this year, a Russian drone came looking for soldiers working nearby. Back in March, it was targeted by the Russians, and it was destroyed by a double-tap attack. They think with a Shahed drone, all the windows blown out, much of the superstructure gone, rubble everywhere. Today is the first time Katarina's been back. It's a great pity for me to lose this room.

10:40This was your life, this was your work. Yeah. Katerina's office is now a van, one of thousands of mobile branches serving millions of Ukrainians. Katerina also delivers medicines and food. People are instantly huddling around the post van, queuing at the side, mostly elderly. The post comes here twice a week. Nadia said the service Katerina provided made a huge difference.

11:12It's a long way for us to travel to Zaporizhia, especially now, at a time when there are attacks all around us. Mikola is 64 years old.

11:25It's very important. It's one of the few joys of the month. You come out, have a chat with people, collect your pension, and go on. Ukraine is a vast rural country made up of thousands of remote villages just like this. and the postal service is part of the glue that holds it all together. And for these people, not too far from the front line, this van can be their last link to the Ukrainian state. What do you think people here think about you? They are proud of me. They love me. We are like a big family. My attitude to them is to my grandmother or my grandfather. But it's dangerous work. Since 2022, Russia's destroyed hundreds of branches and vans, and more than 50 postmen and women have lost their lives.

12:20The head of Ukrapochka, Igor Smelyensky, told us Russia deliberately targeted his teams. Every day, a very simple choice. If we don't go, they don't have basic supply. They don't have food, they don't have medicine. I mean, people will struggle. If we do go, they may delay the decision to evacuate from the areas they probably should have evacuated. Katerina always works with a partner, Slava, who drives and wears a firearm. But the only protection they have is an antenna that can detect drones. Do you not feel scared? No. Why not? It's my work. If I can't, who will do my job?

13:31of the Arts Building.

13:36Coming up on NewsHour, we'll hear from an American mother convicted of child abuse and neglect after allowing her five-year-old son to walk half a mile alone to a nearby pond to gather feathers. She told NewsHour why she's appealing. Because we have such an enormous focus on safety. And so rather than people encountering children and being good neighbours and saying, hello, how are you? And having a normal, healthy interaction with that child, they jump straight to the, we need to alert the authorities there's a child unattended. More on that case in 30 minutes. And one other headline from the BBC newsroom this hour, the US Defense Department has confirmed the war with Iran has led to shortfalls in munitions, contradicting President Trump's assertion that stocks are virtually unlimited.

14:36This is NewsHour from the BBC with me, Tim Franks. One of the things we try not to do on this programme is to do a spot of armchair psychology. But it does seem as if President Trump really is furious. On this occasion, with the Supreme Court. On Monday, a majority of the justices, three of whom Mr Trump had appointed, blocked his plan to make it harder to vote by mail in November's midterm elections. The president said the court was being bullied and cajoled by the radical left into making decisions that have set America back at least 100 years. He went on to say that the people he'd interviewed and then sent to serve on the court are merely a shell of their original selves.

15:20Ankush Khadori is a former federal prosecutor who now writes the Open File newsletter. do we know on what basis the justices made their ruling? We have a very, very cursory and rough explanation. The opinion that the court issued was very brief. It simply said that the court believed that the challengers were likely to succeed on the merits against the government in arguing that the Postal Service rule at issue was beyond the authority of the federal government to issue. And also that the harm that would result to the states and to voters by allowing the administration to move forward so close to the midterm elections would likely significantly outweigh any harm to the federal government from blocking the rule.

16:04But when they use the phrase on the merits, is that a signal to the White House, don't try this again after the midterms because we're unlikely to find favour with it? You know, it is actually a pretty interesting signal. I don't think it will actually deter this White House, But I do think it was an effort to sort of signal to them where this may end, because the court didn't actually need to include that statement. I mean, it's not just about these postal ballots, is it? Can you give me a sense of just how far the administration is trying to recast how elections are managed? So this mail-in ballot thing was, I would say, by far the most significant thing at the moment that the administration has been doing.

16:48But this is just part of a broader, multi-pronged effort on the part of the administration. So one of the other things that is still now pending at the Supreme Court is whether the administration can make available to some states a database that is supposed to help them weed out non-citizen voters. But that appears that it may be riddled with errors and that could, in fact, if it's allowed to be used, could actually disenfranchise voters. So that's one thing. The administration has also been for months now filing cases against states, trying to get them to hand over their voter rules. And what of the Supreme Court as a whole over the last year or so, would you say, Ankush?

17:28I mean, this doesn't be the first time that they've rebuffed some of the more radical moves by this Trump White House. What do you make of the way in which they are passing judgments? And it feels as if they're having to pass a huge number of, you know, really quite significant judgments. That is correct. So I would say, you know, the Trump administration has had a largely successful track record at the Supreme Court, but with several major and significant exceptions. This is one of them. The administration's loss on its effort to undo birthright citizenship. They lost that. They lost the case about their emergency tariffs earlier this year.

18:10So they have lost some very significant cases, but those are the outliers. So, you know, the court has been sort of at the center of the administration's really governing strategy. And you're absolutely right. The court has decided many more significant issues than you would ordinarily expect, in large part because the administration has been so eager to jump the lower court review and the appellate courts and just go straight to the Supreme Court and say, oh, they got it all wrong. And the Supreme Court has in many cases given the administration what they want. But even though those rulings, like the one yesterday, are on what we call in the US the shadow docket or an emergency docket, they have often dealt with, including yesterday's ruling, very, very weighty issues.

18:52The former federal prosecutor, Ankush Khadouri.

19:05genius, good bad billionaire and you're dead to me with a subscription to BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts ad free with an Amazon Music subscription.

19:20Kenya, welcome back to Newsday. I should say Kenya is celebrating after becoming the first African country to be chosen to host the World Athletics Championships. Nairobi beat off competition from London and Rome to hold the 2029 tournament. President William Rito called it a victory for generations of athletes who made the nation synonymous with athletic excellence. But there are questions about the choice of Nairobi, as I've been hearing from the Guardian's chief sports reporter, Sean Ingle. First, though, why was Kenya picked? Clearly, it had been trying to get these champs for a while. And a lot of people in world athletics thought it's Africa's time.

19:58The world championships has been going since 1983. Africa have never hosted them. And as Sebco, the president of World Athletics, said, you know, it will be historic. He said it was, you know, Kenya's one of the great athletics nations. The sport is woven into the country. And he said it was the right host, the right bid, and the right circumstances. Just in terms of, you know, infrastructure, transport, that sort of thing, is Nairobi set up, do you think, to host something as big as the World Athletics? Well, the World Athletics insist that a renovated stadium, which will host 48 ,000 fans, will provide the venue.

20:43I've only been to Kenya twice and I loved it, but having spoken to sporting logistical people, they have made the point that it's not always the easiest to get around. Do you remember, Liz, the World Athletics champs often have, well over a thousand athletes coming along there'll be agents there'll be all the others they expect to stay in nice hotels and whatever else and it is a huge statistical challenge so it's a good question and certainly some of the other bidding teams thought they would have an advantage over Kenya because of those very reasons. I mean the other thing that people may be cocking an eyebrow over is the fact that more than 300 Kenyan athletes have been banned for anti-doping rule violations since World Athletics set up their athletics integrity unit.

21:34How far should we put the two things together, do you think? Kenya is undoubtedly home to some of the greatest track and field athletes the world has ever seen. Some of them, I know I've gone through a glittering career without any any questions without any doping tests however in the last decade it's been a horrific list of top athletes have been banned and kenya has had more positive tests of its top athletes than any other country even even russia so it's a fair question and a fair challenge for kenya what they say in response and what world athletics says in response is that it's now investing five million US dollars into anti-doping so there's lots of tests lots of people on the ground that are you know trying to find the cheat and secondly what athletics believes that hosting these champs in Nairobi will actually add further transparency and it hopes that the country's clean athletes will speak out against doping.

22:35Sean Ingle from the Guardian on Nairobi being chosen to host the 2029 World Athletics Championships.

22:50You're with the BBC World Service and live from London, this is NewsHour with me, Tim Franks. We're going to turn our attention now to Yemen. It's easy to talk about the rekindling conflict there in terms of the big strategic competition, about the role that Iran and Saudi Arabia are playing, about what it means for the global flow of oil. And yes, we will be getting into that in a moment as well as just trying to step back and work through what the fighting is about and who's involved. But along with the bigger picture, it's worth also trying to calibrate the human cost to all this. Yemen, which was already the poorest country in the Middle East, has endured a year upon year of war.

23:28And this latest upsurge in violence has led to more than 100 ,000 people being displaced, according to the UN Refugee Agency. Some of them have even crossed the Bab el-Mandab Strait, the relatively narrow channel of water, off the southwest coast of Yemen and landed in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Sandrine Desemours is with the UNHCR in Djibouti. What has she seen? The first day, it was literally fishermen who were arriving with their small boats and families. Arriving with very little, you could tell that they literally had just fled. The next day, we also saw arrivals. And here, what was interesting is that we saw separation of families, which meant that as they were fleeing, they were separated.

24:15They were also arriving with very little, I guess, literally what they could carry. By the third day, the numbers were much more. They were arriving with bigger boats, with, again, separation of family. They were also arriving with many more bags. They were also arriving with animals. And also we saw more young men arriving. In the previous arrivals, it was mainly women and children, and children quite young. But by the third day, we saw a lot of adolescents who were arriving and fleeing forced recruitment. And then the peak on 13th, the numbers just skyrocketed, but people really coming with much more and discussing that they could not remain because everything had been destroyed.

25:06Whereas the very first set of arrivals were saying that they had left indiscriminate bombing, mainly by Saudi Arabia. but then subsequently they were discussing indiscriminate bombings by both sides and they don't know who's doing the bombing and they were leaving. And just to be clear, Sandrine, when you talked about adolescents, so teenage boys, I guess, who were saying that they were concerned about forced recruitment, were they saying by whom? That is correct. They were slightly reluctant to say by whom, but some did quietly tell us it was by the Houthis. Right. I mean, are we talking thousands here?

25:48Do you think cumulatively over the past few days have turned up? Definitely. And these are from the government entry points. As of today, we're at 2 ,498 refugees who've arrived, but there could be other areas from which they are arriving that are not registered. Understood. Are you able to cope or is this a sort of influx that, to be honest, you were not really prepared for? So the ones who are arriving in government entry points, so there are facilities there. And immediately the humanitarians do start to provide water, facilities, warm food and etc. There are those who are arriving in fishermen's towns.

26:34And so we have been doing back and forth. They are immediately taken to the major port where the immigration is. But we were not expecting it. But the facilities are there and humanitarian workers are there to be able to assist government in meeting what for this government is an influx. As conflict escalates, there probably will be more refugees arriving. And it may be a situation as in 2015, when almost 20 ,000 persons did come to Djibouti, 9 ,000 of them being Yemeni. And out of those 9 ,000, almost 4 ,000 sought asylum here in Djibouti. But our planning is now preparing for more arrivals of refugees.

27:21Sanjine Desamour from the UNHCR in Djibouti. From those very immediate accounts of fear and desperation caused by the latest fighting, Let's now try to get a sense of that bigger picture with one of our regular experts on the region, the investigative journalist Iona Craig. She's a specialist in Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula. Should we be still saying that Yemen is on the brink or are we now in a full-fledged war? This is definitely full-fledged war now. Given the scale and expanse of the fighting across Yemen, there isn't just fighting on that western Red Sea coast which we've been hearing a lot about but it's in the north up in Al Jauf on the east near Marib and also further inland around the city of Tyres so yes this is now we are back almost in a in a sense of where we were 10 years ago in Yemen unfortunately and the conditions as we've just been hearing for people on the ground is is very similar to where they were in sort of 2015 and 2016.