Baltic drone crashes unlock €12 billion defence push

An armed drone carrying explosives blew up on Latvian soil last week. Nothing intercepted it. Two days later, Ursula von der Leyen was in Vilnius, promising €12 billion in defence loans and describing the incursions as "a deliberate Russian strategy to destabilise democratic societies." Lithuania's State Defence Council meets tomorrow to examine air-defence readiness.

The awkward fact is that NATO's Baltic air mission was built for a different problem. Since 2004, allied jets have guarded the region against Russian military aircraft. They were never designed around Ukrainian drones being pushed off course by Russian jamming and arriving, still armed, over allied territory.

A policing mission meets a drone war

Since early May, Ukrainian combat drones have entered Baltic airspace several times. Lithuania's defence ministry has confirmed that both drones found on Lithuanian soil this year were Ukrainian systems diverted by Russian electronic warfare.

The mechanics are now clear enough. Russia has expanded its GPS-spoofing antenna network in Kaliningrad from three to 36 units in a year. That is enough to blind a drone's navigation and shove it westward, away from Russian airspace and towards the Baltics.

On May 19, a Romanian F-16 operating under NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission, the rotating fighter presence that has guarded Baltic skies since 2004, shot down a drone over Estonia. It was the first such engagement over allied territory.

Even that success came with a warning attached. An Estonian commander said it had worked partly because of "favourable weather." Peacetime rules require visual identification before firing. Clear skies made that possible. In cloud cover, or at night, the same drone would probably have kept going.

Baltic Air Policing is still a surveillance-and-escort mission. If a pilot is to fire, the decision runs through NATO's air operations centre in Germany. Lithuania's military chief, General Vaikšnoras, put the problem plainly. "Processes are not fast enough," he told reporters (LRT, Lrytas).

The three Baltic presidents are now asking for a bigger shift. On May 21, they called for NATO to move from Air Policing to a full Air Defence mission, with local commanders able to engage threats, permanent fighter basing, and integrated counter-drone systems.

That needs agreement from all 32 NATO members through the North Atlantic Council, where every ally has a veto. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has called the current system "effective." When Estonia's foreign minister argued that Russia was deliberately steering drones into allied airspace, Rutte replied: "I have no information on that."

Brussels funds hardware. NATO runs intercepts. Nobody connects the systems.

Von der Leyen's Vilnius package is not cosmetic. It includes SAFE defence loans, the EU's new instrument for member-state arms purchases, for all three Baltic states, along with €1.5 billion in redirected EU cohesion funds. Cohesion money is normally used to narrow economic gaps between regions. Here, part of it is being pointed at the hard edge of European security.

Her call for a "unified drone alert system" came with a careful qualification. The Commission "could initiate" an assessment. No legislative proposal followed.

That distinction matters. Under the EU treaties, air defence sits with member states and NATO. The Commission can help pay for procurement. It cannot order an intercept.

Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius has launched an EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance and a separate drone defence initiative aimed at delivering capability by the end of 2027. Both are industrial coordination efforts, designed to speed up production. Neither decides who fires, when, or at what.

Across NATO's eastern flank, six separate counter-drone architectures are now being built at once: three Baltic national systems, Poland's 18-battery SAN programme, Finland's layered border sensors, and a Nordic four-country procurement alliance formalised this month under NORDEFCO, the Nordic defence cooperation framework.

Each country is buying its own radars and interceptors. EU SAFE loans fund those national purchases without interoperability conditions. In plainer terms, Brussels is helping to buy the kit, while NATO retains the command chain, and the systems being bought may not speak naturally to each other.

The hardest question in every incident is still attribution. Ukrainian drones, diverted by Russian jamming, are landing as armed munitions on NATO soil. Whether Moscow is deliberately seeking that outcome, or simply creating the conditions for it while shielding its own airspace, will shape the argument at NATO's Ankara summit in July.

There, 32 allies will have to decide whether to keep a command architecture that worked once, in good weather, against a slow-moving target.