A Lithuanian Drone Provocation Almost Derailed Witkoff’s & Kushner’s Trip To Moscow

Had it not been downed over the Belarusian border city of Grodno and instead passed into Poland on the way to the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Centre like its recovered flight data revealed to be its route, it could have sparked a crisis that ruined the renascent peace talks.

Trump’s Special Envoy for Russia Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, both of whom played important roles in negotiating the Gaza peace deal, met with Putin at the Kremlin for five hours on Tuesday. Their trip could have been derailed, however, had a Lithuanian provocation succeeded. A state-of-the-art Western spy drone from there was downed over the western Belarusian border city of Grodno on Sunday, but the recovered flight data indicated that it was supposed to fly as far as western Poland.

The route would have taken it to Bydgoszcz, which hosts the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Centre, before returning back the same way. This could have in turn sparked a crisis since Western warmongers would have certainly misreported the incident, possibly using manipulated flight and radar data, to claim that Russia launched the drone from Belarus. They might even have lied that it was an armed drone in order to maximally dramatize the incident for derailing the then-upcoming talks.

Several alleged Russian drones entered Poland around two and a half months ago in an incident that was arguably attributable to NATO jamming ahead of the then-upcoming Zapad 2025 drills but was exploited by the Polish “deep state” in a failed attempt to manipulate the president into war with Russia. Since then, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and his KGB chief Ivan Tertel confirmed that their country wants a “big deal” with the US, which would naturally include a de-escalation deal with Poland.

The aforesaid arrangements would prospectively be part of a grand Russian-US compromise for ending the Ukrainian Conflict, but if the Polish-Belarusian deal therein were to suddenly be sabotaged, then it might be more difficult to reach anything more significant. Therein lies the full importance of the latest Lithuanian drone provocation, which wasn’t the first since Tertel claimed in April 2024 that Belarus thwarted a drone attack against Minsk from there, namely to ruin the whole diplomatic sequence.

After all, the scenario of an alleged (possibly “armed”) Russian drone launched from Belarus being downed en route to the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Centre practically on the eve of Witkoff’s and Kushner’s trip to Moscow would be sensational. Not only that, but Chair of the NATO Military Committee Giuseppe Cavo Dragone just revealed that the bloc is considering “pre-emptive (cyber) strike[s]” against Russia as “responses” to its “hybrid warfare”, which could have followed.

Amidst spiraling Russian-Western tensions in that event, Witkoff’s and Kushner’s trip to Moscow would have been unviable, thus dealing a potentially lethal blow to Trump’s latest – and possibly last – push for peace in Ukraine. Recalling how the Brits were likely the ones responsible for Bloomberg’s recent Russian-US leaks as argued here, which were aimed at sabotaging their talks, it’s possible that these historical masters of divide-and-rule plots and false flag provocations were behind this provocation too.

If Trump is serious about reaching a deal with Putin, then he should publicly declare that the US won’t be dragged into a war with Russia if NATO members launch any sort of “pre-emptive strike” against it in response to suspicious incidents like alleged drone incursions. Not doing so risks emboldening the (British?) orchestrators of this latest provocation into trying again and again until they finally succeed in sparking a crisis which ruins all that he’s trying to achieve and brings the world to the brink of all-out war.