Executive Summary
Lithuania is bound by the European Union's 2022 collective pledge and the United Nations General Assembly's 155-vote 2022 moratorium against destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite testing. Kinetic anti-satellite pooling is therefore off the table — there is also no NATO anti-satellite pool to join. The realistic pathway is alliance membership in the rooms where space-domain decisions are made. The Allied Persistent Surveillance from Space programme reached initial operational capability on 4 December 2025 with seventeen contributing nations averaging €42.8 million each (Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Türkiye, United States — Lithuania and Estonia absent, door open). The Combined Space Operations initiative remains a ten-nation club; partner status is requested through the French channel opened by the Treaty of Nancy (signed 9 May 2025 between Poland and France; first follow-on at Tusk-Macron Gdansk on 20 April 2026, advancing an Airbus / Thales / Radmor Polish military satellite-communications track without Lithuania). Macron's Île Longue speech on 2 March 2026 named Germany, Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Denmark and the United Kingdom at Northwood; the Baltic states, Norway and Finland were absent from the named list — analysts at the Atlantic Council, ECFR, Chatham House and CSIS read this as de-facto exclusion, not explicit exclusion. This is a gap Lithuania should close on Lithuanian terms. The recommended next step is a parliamentary working group, with Ministry of National Defence and French liaison input, to scope an accession application to Allied Persistent Surveillance from Space, a Combined Space Operations partner-status request, and a rider on the Treaty of Nancy follow-on covering Suwałki Gap satellite-communications redundancy. Sovereign capability — should the working group confirm the path — would narrow to GLONASS user-segment denial (jamming the ground users in Lithuanian airspace; the satellite stays intact in medium-Earth orbit) and one to two Space Situational Awareness optical sites, alongside a research-only laser-dazzler track at Brolis Semiconductors and Aktyvus Photonics. The illustrative envelope is roughly €48 million over three years; final scope, vendors and architecture are procurement decisions for the Ministry of National Defence and the Seimas.
The Problem
Russian precision strike against Lithuania (Iskander-M ballistic, Iskander-K cruise, Kalibr) is GLONASS-aided. Without GLONASS, circular error probable degrades from roughly five metres to thirty to one hundred and fifty metres on inertial-only guidance (RAND 2024; Spire 2025) — the difference between a hit on the Ministry building and a miss into the next block. Russia jams allied satellite navigation persistently across the Baltic; the International Telecommunication Union formally condemned this electronic warfare in 2025. Lithuania has no reciprocal user-segment denial node and is absent from the alliance space-architecture rooms — Allied Persistent Surveillance from Space, Combined Space Operations, the Treaty of Nancy follow-on, the named partner list at Île Longue.
No GLONASS user-segment denial node on Lithuanian soil. No Space Situational Awareness optical contribution to feed Allied Persistent Surveillance from Space. No accession application filed to that programme. No partner-status request lodged with Combined Space Operations. No rider on the Treaty of Nancy follow-on covering Suwałki Gap satellite-communications redundancy. No liaison officer at NATO Space Centre Toulouse, no participation in the Ramstein Sovereign Cyber Effects Provided Voluntarily by Allies framework. NanoAvionics — the Vilnius-based satellite-bus manufacturer often cited as Lithuanian sovereign capability — has been Norwegian-owned (Kongsberg) since 2022, so any sovereign use requires Norwegian export-licence concurrence.
Without action: Exclusion from the rooms where Lithuanian deterrence interests are decided. Russian precision strike retains full GLONASS-aided accuracy against Lithuanian and NATO forces in the Lithuanian area of operations with no reversible local mitigation. The alliance-membership window is open in 2026 — Allied Persistent Surveillance from Space accession decisions are live, the Treaty of Nancy follow-on tracks were established 20 April 2026, Île Longue signalling was 2 March 2026.
Lithuanian Context
Lithuania sits on the eastern flank, with Kaliningrad three hundred kilometres from Vilnius — Iskander-K cruise missiles reach jammer sites in roughly two-and-a-half to five minutes, so any fixed site needs hardening, mobility (shoot-and-scoot), and a three-to-one decoy ratio. The horizon footprint of a GLONASS satellite at medium-Earth-orbit altitude (19,100 kilometres) reaches roughly 24,661 kilometres from any Lithuanian site, so a denial bubble bleeds across Polish, Belarusian, Estonian, Latvian and Ukrainian airspace — civil aviation, mobile networks and banking timing all carry collateral risk, requiring pre-coordination with Polish, Estonian and Latvian air-traffic control plus Eurocontrol notification. Russian counter-counterspace retaliation is documented (Tobol-class strategic electronic warfare, Murmansk-BN, Nudol direct-ascent anti-satellite, twenty-plus jamming envelopes against allied satellite-communications since 2024); the cost imposed on Lithuanian civilian infrastructure may exceed the cost imposed on Russia. Bubble activation is therefore for engagement windows only, not strategic posture. Cyber effects against Russian space ground segments flow exclusively through the Ramstein Sovereign Cyber Effects Provided Voluntarily by Allies framework under cleared mission authorisation — sovereign Lithuanian cyber from Lithuanian internet-protocol space would hand Russia an information-operations gift. The Outer Space Treaty (Articles VI and IX) flows state responsibility to Lithuania for non-governmental dazzler activity at Brolis Semiconductors and Aktyvus Photonics, requiring an authorisation-and-supervision framework before any orbital target test. Lithuania's 2026 defence budget is €4.79 billion or 5.38 percent of gross domestic product; the weapons envelope is roughly €1.7 billion. The illustrative €48 million envelope over three years sits well inside that — final scope is a procurement decision.