The article doesn't describe how the balloons are controlled or tracked, but it seems inevitable that the combination of advances in electronics, cryptocurrences, and new tariffs will make smuggling of all kinds explode over the next few years, by air, by water, and even by land. You could see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb as a kind of smuggling, the kind where the recipient of the shipment doesn't want it.
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.
Entirely likely, and my first thought. It would be an ideal and cheap way for Russia to probe responses and results with complete plausible deniability. Jsut testing for another route to destabilize targets.
It wouldn't be a bit surprising from a bloc known for weaponizing regional poverty and migration by aggravating wars to stimulate migration and even literally bussing migrants the borders of Poland and other countries to create instability in target countries.
Or, it could just be some smuggling crew going wild to meet some deadline or get stuff shipped before a coming crackdown. Or both.
I haven't found much utility in reading Russian-language sources, though I can read the language.
Unfortunately I'm not extrapolating, this fits within a very mature pattern. See 'Little Green Men' in lead-up to Ukraine invasion and the drones violating airspace that Poland has been shooting down.
Show any weakness, any concession, any compromise, blink and you get invaded. Its not complicated. They communicate it pretty blatantly internally. And once you are invaded, they do a settlement and education program to have a reason for interventions. The chamberlains of europe and the us, talking to themselves about peace, are inviting them.
The smugglers must have a high tolerance for loss acceptance if this is their delivery route. I'd love to know more about the logistics on this. Searching for this topic just returns various sites with the same report. A headline from Fortune suggests these are hot air balloons, but the image in TFA does not indicate that at all. 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? Inquiring minds want to know
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.
There is an insane amount of smuggling of cigarettes going on in Australia. Currently about 50% of consumption, and rising.
It's causing USA prohibition like effects. With criminal gangs distributing in charge of distribution, protection rackets are now common place. [0] Literally hundreds of tobacco shops burnt to the ground this year. So many that TV regularly features tobacco shop arsonists caught on CCTV spilling accelerant on their clothes, and setting fire to themselves. The build up of money is letting expanding their criminal enterprises into other areas, so we are seeing a corresponding rise in car crime, importation of guns, and smuggling in other areas, and some inventive stuff like using private ATM's for money laundering.
The government is now trying a law enforcement push get control of it. But of course they were doing that before, so I presume more of the same will fail.
I don't know if this is true. A pack of cigarettes in Virginia costs... what 4 bucks? 5?
Those Virginia taxed cigarettes are sold in NYC for 10 bucks a pack now or 1 dollar a loosey (a... friend told me). That's 2x on packs and 4x on looseys.
That gives you a pretty healthy margin before busts could impact your profits.
Presumably you're also buying them in bulk in Virginia for cheaper than the 4 or 5 dollar store price too.
Cigarettes are probably a nickel a piece coming off the line?
A nickel!?? Good heavens probably the whole pack full doesn't even cost a nickel to manufacture. Manufacturing cost per cigarette must surely be waaay under a penny. Disregarding marketing and distribution expenses of course.
I don't know if it involves narco submarines but these is indeed a huge problem with smuggled cigarettes in Australia due to the extremely high tax making it very much worth the while of organised criminal gangs
In Lithuania it's around €5 per pack, and in Belarus around €2. If you assume 20kg is 800 packs, then you are talking a few thousand profit per shipment. Minimum wage, after tax, in Lithuania is €700.
Tabacco is nicotin juices and leaf cellulose dried. Could you extract the juices and then apply that concentrate to something similar at target location like hay?
You can already buy concentrated liquid nicotine, it’s called e-liquid or vape juice. All you need is a heating element, no organic material required. 48mg/ml!
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.)
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.
If they are anything like Belomorkanal then they must be desperate. A Russian friend brought a carton back years ago claiming they were about $0.60 a pack. Man were they absolutely vile.
Another I forgot were these Chinese cigarettes a friend once bought which tasted and smelled like burning solder rosin flux. That was another one or two puff and toss.
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.
Just guessing, but it seems like you could duct tape a phone with a data plan and have it email you it's gps coordinates every 15 min under 10,000ft and every 5 min under 500 ft, or whatever is reasonable. I bet 80% of them land within reach of one of those extendable tree limb cutters, let them drop to the ground and drive off; and the other 20% are merely cost of doing business.
Shooting them down with what? These things will fly at high altitudes. How do you find them at that altitude in the dark to shoot with what, a rifle? US military took more than one missile to shoot down the very much larger Chinese balloon. It's not as simple as you might be thinking
That seems improbable? Lithuania is only a couple hundred miles across and these balloons are completely at the mercy of wind.
I would expect the balloon owners want a quick hop over border security. Chasing them down over hundreds of miles of potentially private property sounds like more trouble than it would be worth.
What is shorter hops in this sense to you? If you make some sort of weather balloon where the balloon never bursts, yes, they will travel very far. If you use a cheaper balloon that does burst, they don't travel down range very far in comparison. As I posted previously, depending on the balloon/parachute/payload, our little "experiment" went just over 100+ miles. That seems fairly acceptable. You could start 50 miles away from the border, and the recovery team would also be 50 miles away from the border. That's a pretty good buffer from any security teams working border crossings.
Hot air. They'll fall of their own accord once the fuel is gone. Might not even use fuel, just a big bag you inflate with hot air and it stays aloft long enough.
>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.
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.
I had to also look that up. I thought this was specifically a Lithuania thing. It looks like it's both Lithuania and EU regulations. I didn't realize Lithuania was an EU member.
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.
Strange. Presumably there are many different methods which would be much more efficient and reliable. And I don't see any mention on how they would track and recover the cargo.
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.
nothing "professional". we used a handheld off trail hiking tracker. it stops tracking at the higher altitudes, but picked back up once it returned under that altitude. it led us right to it. it updates once every five minutes. we knew it was on the ground when it started repeating the same location.
The article doesn't describe how the balloons are controlled or tracked, but it seems inevitable that the combination of advances in electronics, cryptocurrences, and new tariffs will make smuggling of all kinds explode over the next few years, by air, by water, and even by land. You could see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb as a kind of smuggling, the kind where the recipient of the shipment doesn't want it.
This might be paranoia, but could this be state sponsored?
I can see a lot of reasons for Belarus and Russia to create lots of contacts in EU airspace. The strategy is called "salami slicing" [0]
Especially in light of the point the others are making-- this is a really unreliable form of smuggling.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics
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.
Entirely likely, and my first thought. It would be an ideal and cheap way for Russia to probe responses and results with complete plausible deniability. Jsut testing for another route to destabilize targets.
It wouldn't be a bit surprising from a bloc known for weaponizing regional poverty and migration by aggravating wars to stimulate migration and even literally bussing migrants the borders of Poland and other countries to create instability in target countries.
Or, it could just be some smuggling crew going wild to meet some deadline or get stuff shipped before a coming crackdown. Or both.
> 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.
I haven't found much utility in reading Russian-language sources, though I can read the language.
Unfortunately I'm not extrapolating, this fits within a very mature pattern. See 'Little Green Men' in lead-up to Ukraine invasion and the drones violating airspace that Poland has been shooting down.
Show any weakness, any concession, any compromise, blink and you get invaded. Its not complicated. They communicate it pretty blatantly internally. And once you are invaded, they do a settlement and education program to have a reason for interventions. The chamberlains of europe and the us, talking to themselves about peace, are inviting them.
Have there been any leaks of internal communications?
because everything that Russia-aligned news sources say about the war in Ukraine makes a grand and indivisible amount of sense.
Nowhere in my comment do I say that.
The smugglers must have a high tolerance for loss acceptance if this is their delivery route. I'd love to know more about the logistics on this. Searching for this topic just returns various sites with the same report. A headline from Fortune suggests these are hot air balloons, but the image in TFA does not indicate that at all. 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? Inquiring minds want to know
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.
There is an insane amount of smuggling of cigarettes going on in Australia. Currently about 50% of consumption, and rising.
It's causing USA prohibition like effects. With criminal gangs distributing in charge of distribution, protection rackets are now common place. [0] Literally hundreds of tobacco shops burnt to the ground this year. So many that TV regularly features tobacco shop arsonists caught on CCTV spilling accelerant on their clothes, and setting fire to themselves. The build up of money is letting expanding their criminal enterprises into other areas, so we are seeing a corresponding rise in car crime, importation of guns, and smuggling in other areas, and some inventive stuff like using private ATM's for money laundering.
The government is now trying a law enforcement push get control of it. But of course they were doing that before, so I presume more of the same will fail.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-04/illegal-tobacco-is-a-...
I don't know if this is true. A pack of cigarettes in Virginia costs... what 4 bucks? 5?
Those Virginia taxed cigarettes are sold in NYC for 10 bucks a pack now or 1 dollar a loosey (a... friend told me). That's 2x on packs and 4x on looseys.
That gives you a pretty healthy margin before busts could impact your profits.
Presumably you're also buying them in bulk in Virginia for cheaper than the 4 or 5 dollar store price too.
Cigarettes are probably a nickel a piece coming off the line?
A nickel!?? Good heavens probably the whole pack full doesn't even cost a nickel to manufacture. Manufacturing cost per cigarette must surely be waaay under a penny. Disregarding marketing and distribution expenses of course.
Balloons rely on the wind, you could only do this where prevailing winds almost certainly put your balloon into some place you can retrieve it.
I don't know if it involves narco submarines but these is indeed a huge problem with smuggled cigarettes in Australia due to the extremely high tax making it very much worth the while of organised criminal gangs
In Lithuania it's around €5 per pack, and in Belarus around €2. If you assume 20kg is 800 packs, then you are talking a few thousand profit per shipment. Minimum wage, after tax, in Lithuania is €700.
Tabacco is nicotin juices and leaf cellulose dried. Could you extract the juices and then apply that concentrate to something similar at target location like hay?
You could dip blotter paper with colorful artwork in pure nicotine, and consume them like LSD.
They'd also be easy to send through the normal post!
You can already buy concentrated liquid nicotine, it’s called e-liquid or vape juice. All you need is a heating element, no organic material required. 48mg/ml!
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.)
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.
If they are anything like Belomorkanal then they must be desperate. A Russian friend brought a carton back years ago claiming they were about $0.60 a pack. Man were they absolutely vile.
You could say they were the 21th century version of those. Looked like a normal cigarette, smelled like sulfur and burnt tea leaves.
Another I forgot were these Chinese cigarettes a friend once bought which tasted and smelled like burning solder rosin flux. That was another one or two puff and toss.
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.
Just guessing, but it seems like you could duct tape a phone with a data plan and have it email you it's gps coordinates every 15 min under 10,000ft and every 5 min under 500 ft, or whatever is reasonable. I bet 80% of them land within reach of one of those extendable tree limb cutters, let them drop to the ground and drive off; and the other 20% are merely cost of doing business.
Shooting them down with what? These things will fly at high altitudes. How do you find them at that altitude in the dark to shoot with what, a rifle? US military took more than one missile to shoot down the very much larger Chinese balloon. It's not as simple as you might be thinking
> These things will fly at high altitudes.
That seems improbable? Lithuania is only a couple hundred miles across and these balloons are completely at the mercy of wind.
I would expect the balloon owners want a quick hop over border security. Chasing them down over hundreds of miles of potentially private property sounds like more trouble than it would be worth.
Helium or hydrogen balloons are easier to fly at higb altitudes, but you might be right that shorter hops would be more controllable.
What is shorter hops in this sense to you? If you make some sort of weather balloon where the balloon never bursts, yes, they will travel very far. If you use a cheaper balloon that does burst, they don't travel down range very far in comparison. As I posted previously, depending on the balloon/parachute/payload, our little "experiment" went just over 100+ miles. That seems fairly acceptable. You could start 50 miles away from the border, and the recovery team would also be 50 miles away from the border. That's a pretty good buffer from any security teams working border crossings.
Shorter hops as in tens of kilometers rather than thousands.
I think you can just use mylar, but maybe you'd need a net over it?
Hot air. They'll fall of their own accord once the fuel is gone. Might not even use fuel, just a big bag you inflate with hot air and it stays aloft long enough.
>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.
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.
Piracy is a service problem. Maybe if this is happening at such a scale, cigarettes are too highly taxed.
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.
Who is they reffering to? I doubt any tobacco is grown at a commercial scale Europe.
EDIT: Wikipedia would indicate there is tobacco production within Europe. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/TobaccoY...
I had to also look that up. I thought this was specifically a Lithuania thing. It looks like it's both Lithuania and EU regulations. I didn't realize Lithuania was an EU member.
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.
Strange. Presumably there are many different methods which would be much more efficient and reliable. And I don't see any mention on how they would track and recover the cargo.
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.
What kinds of locators did you use?
nothing "professional". we used a handheld off trail hiking tracker. it stops tracking at the higher altitudes, but picked back up once it returned under that altitude. it led us right to it. it updates once every five minutes. we knew it was on the ground when it started repeating the same location.
Yeah, that's an arms control antiproliferation regulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb