Cigarette-smuggling balloons force closure of Lithuanian airport

According to the Enforcer's (https://www.youtube.com/@EnforcerOfficial) stream yesterday

They just use prevailing wind routes, and toss tons of balloons up, and have 'em float over the border cause cigarette taxes are so high in Europe that it's worth it.

And then there's people waiting along the wind path to pick up the balloons as they come down.

There's a lot of inefficiencies built into smuggling operations. You can absolutely grab huge amounts of smuggled items in busts and not end up denting profits for the smugglers cause they're smuggling so much (see cocaine, fentanyl, cigarettes in blue states in America).

I wouldn't entirely rule out the Russians or Belarussions doing probing moves, but the Enforcer's been a great source of information for these events as they occur.

There's a fair number of articles from previous encounters - https://fortune.com/2025/10/05/hot-air-balloons-smuggling-ci...

It's entirely possible that the operations are in cahoots and this is an intelligence operation being conducted as a smuggling operation.

> this is a really unreliable form of smuggling

It's a reliable way to spread bad breath and cancer.

Consider you may be spending too much time reading West-aligned news sources.

Depending on the terrain the loss rate might not be high. Put a cell phone in the package. Location tracking, find the phone. If they're dropping into ares with cell coverage and flat enough that they're likely reachable then you won't lose a lot.

And if you're dropping into areas without coverage you put something like an inReach on the balloon, set to send out pings. And put an AirTag or the like in it because the balloon might land on the transmitter and block it. (I own an inReach, know it can send pings at 2 minute or 10 minute intervals, I've only used them to look up where I was once (the real reason I have it is the SOS button works pretty much anywhere and even if I couldn't push it S&R would look up the last ping) but the website was spot on to normal GPS accuracy. There are competitors but I do not know their capability.)

Yeah the price differential isn't high enough to justify narco smuggler like loss rates.

On the other hand, take a look at the price difference of cigarettes between Australia and Indonesia, like 20x. There must be a pretty insane volume of smuggling going on between those countries seperate by a short straight of Ocean, it would support narco submarine levels of sophistication.

I recall a friend of mine smoking cigarettes smuggled from Belarus back in 2006 costing 2,30PLN a pack, so less than €0,60 at the time.

Considering how light the product was, that translated to ~€20 per kilogram, with about 20% of this figure being the cost of third rate tobacco stuffed into those cigarettes.

The smell was distinctly foul, but he was happy with the bargain he got on them.

>They mentioned 25 balloons at one time, so this is not a small operation. Do they have 25 separate teams waiting for the balloons, or is one or two receiving groups expected to locate them all?

Maybe the guy in the lawn chair with a BB gun got away.

I assume they let them fly at night and they have some form of GPS and way to communicate the data positions. The pickup team maybe just needs to shoot them down on top of a inhabited area.

ciagrettes are tobacco and paper. consider how dirt cheap those things are as raw materials when the price doesn't include sales tax or excise tax and doesn't account for the demand generated by addicts. In terms of just the cost of sourcing the materials and processing them into cigarettes you could probably afford to lose 90% of your product and still make money.

As far as 25 balloons 25 teams, I think this is another r breeding strategy type of thing: inputs are dirt cheap so massive losses can be tolerated, and 25 balloons being tracked means there have to be at least 25 officers chasing each balloon in order to arrest the smuggler picking them up, but one smuggler successfully retrieving one balloon ends the day with more money than he started. I think it's designed to exploit the extremely asymmetric costs associated with tying some cigarettes to a balloon when compared to the cost of tracking a balloon across europe and arresting whoever receives it.

tldr - you're absolutely right, the difference between the price of the raw materials in a cigarette and the price of the actual cigarette means they can tolerate extreme losses and still make money.

Tracking and recovery is as simple as placing a GPS locator on the payload, and then driving+hiking out to where the payload lands. hopefully on dry land. If these are simple balloons using hydrogen or helium, they will continue to rise in altitude until the gasses expand to the point the balloon bursts. This could take around 2-3 hours depending on size of balloon and weight of payload. Once the balloon bursts, it's just free falling with I'd assume a parachute of some sort. From burst altitude to on the ground would be about an hour again depending on weight and parachute. From there, you just go to the dot on the map. This is all based on my personal experience with helium balloon "experiments". Balloon reached close to 90000', and went 100+ miles down range in about 3 hours from launch to landing.

Depending on how sophisticated the efforts are, there are websites you can go to that will give you a flight path prediction based on current+previous day(s) wind. So you could stage recovery teams in the general area to get much closer. There could also be some sort of timer that some how deflates the balloon instead of waiting for simple physics to have a little more control. At the end of the day you are subject to whatever the wind currents are.

That's the point, though. The taxes are there to discourage use. Certainly smuggling from lower-tax or tax-free places is going to be expected in that scenario, but it doesn't mean that the higher taxes aren't working for the intended purpose. Sure, they're working less than they could have in the absence of smuggling, which you probably are never going to be able to fully stamp out, but that's ok.

Just from googling around because I also had this question.

It doesn't look like it's so much a tax issue as it is a labor issue. (Well, it is a tariff issue and tariffs are taxes).

My guess is that they aren't growing enough tobacco to meet local demand which has ultimately kicked up prices.