Lithuania has received delivery of a Bayraktar combat drone from Turkey after hundreds of Lithuanians clubbed together to buy it for Ukraine, the Defense Ministry said Monday.
The Turkish drone magnate Baykar said in June it would donate the unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) for free, with Lithuania’s government committing to spend 1.5 million euros ($1.56 million) of the crowdfunded money to arm it and the rest of the nearly 6 million euros collected going toward humanitarian help for Ukraine.
The TB2 has been hugely popular in Ukraine, where it helped destroy Russian artillery systems and armored vehicles. It even became the subject of a patriotic expletive-strewn hit song in Ukraine that mocked Russian troops, with the chorus “Bayraktar, Bayraktar.”
Pictures shared by the Lithuanian government showed the drone delivered with a logo of a hawk, in Lithuania’s and Ukraine’s colors. An internet vote in Lithuania named the done after the bird.
Ukraine has bought more than 20 Bayraktar TB2 armed drones from Baykar in recent years and ordered a further 16 on Jan. 27. That batch was delivered in early March.
Baykar late last month said it would be donating three drones to Ukraine, after a crowdfunding campaign there raised enough funds to buy “several” of the Bayraktar TB2 model.
The company said the crowdfunding campaign in Ukraine had reached the milestone in a few days and that business leaders as well ordinary people contributed to the fund.
It said it would not accept payment for the TB2s and will send three UAVs free of charge to the Ukrainian war front, asking for the raised funds to be remitted instead to the struggling people of Ukraine.
Russia has previously complained to Turkey over its sale of Bayraktar TB2 armed drones to Ukraine, a high-level Turkish bureaucrat said, but added that the sales by Baykar, a private company, were not state-to-state deals.
The TB2, which has also been used in the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Karabakh, now spearheads Turkey’s global defense export push.
