Pabrade

Pabrade is a town in southeastern Lithuania, approximately 45 km northeast of Vilnius, and is home to the Pabrade Training Area, one of Lithuania's main military training facilities. The training area hosts exercises for both Lithuanian armed forces and NATO allies, and its location on the NATO eastern flank, close to the Belarus and Kaliningrad borders, makes it a natural site for exercises designed to simulate high-threat, near-peer adversary environments. The site is equipped to support large armoured and combined-arms manoeuvres, and its open terrain and communications infrastructure make it usable for electronic-warfare and GPS-denial exercises. Lithuania as a whole has positioned itself as one of NATO's front-line training nations since 2014, receiving the NATO Enhanced Forward Presence battlegroup led by Germany at Rukla and hosting frequent multinational exercises.

In June 2026 the Pabrade Training Area hosted Project Flytrap 5.0, a US Army V Corps exercise in which Helsing's HX-2 AI strike drone was tested under GPS-denied, electronic-warfare-contested conditions. The exercise achieved 15 kills and 2 near-misses across 17 engagements , marking the first confirmed US Army operational test of a European autonomous strike drone at a NATO facility. The choice of Pabrade rather than a US test range is significant: the electronic-warfare environment at the training area reflects actual degraded-signal conditions on the NATO-Russia frontier, which US-based ranges cannot replicate at comparable Fidelity.

Pabrade's growing profile as a testing site for advanced drone systems reflects Lithuania's broader role in NATO's eastern defence posture and its willingness to host exercises that carry operational sensitivity given proximity to Russian and Belarusian territory.