Latvian Government Falls After NATO Air Rules Block Border Drone Shootdown

On the night of May 7, French fighter jets on Baltic air policing duty saw a drone over Rēzekne, a Latvian city 40 kilometres from the Russian border. They followed it by sight. They were armed. They did not fire. The explanation, reported days later by Latvian television, was spare: "engagement criteria were not met." Within a week, Latvia's defence minister was gone, the prime minister followed, and the government collapsed (Le Monde, Breaking Defense).

The system did what it was built to do. The problem is that the threat has moved faster than the system.

Four Nodes, No Trigger

NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission runs through a chain with four separate points of authority. The North Atlantic Council, where all 32 allies must agree, sets the rules of engagement. SACEUR, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and always an American general, turns those rules into operational orders. CAOC Uedem, the round-the-clock command centre in Germany, orders the scramble. The country providing the jets, France in this case, still keeps a national veto over weapons release through its own military command (NATO, Defence Matters).

Latvia cannot tell a NATO pilot to fire. It has no combat aircraft of its own. It supplies the runway and radar infrastructure, but the decision to pull the trigger sits in Paris, passes through Uedem, and is constrained by rules agreed in Brussels. Latvia's NATO ambassador has acknowledged that drones entering Latvian airspace are "primarily" Latvia's responsibility, while Latvia lacks the capability to meet that responsibility on its own (LRT).

The rules require visual identification, confidence that falling debris will not hurt civilians, and a judgement on proportionality. For a slow drone crossing at 200 metres over a populated city at 3am, those tests may be impossible to satisfy before the aircraft reaches whatever it is heading towards.

The Bilateral Workaround

Eastern flank states have drawn their own conclusion from NATO's consensus timetable. They are building bilateral arrangements with Ukraine, the country that has learned, under fire, how modern drone warfare actually works. At the Bucharest Nine summit on May 13, Lithuania signed a full Drone Deal with Ukraine covering joint production of four classes of drone on Lithuanian soil (Euromaidan Press). Poland and Estonia are co-developing the Mark 1 anti-drone missile, with Polish factories preparing for mass production and combat trials already under way in Ukraine (Army Recognition).

NATO secretary general Mark Rutte backed the argument at the summit: "We cannot continue taking out $20,000 drones with 3 or 4 million missiles... Ukraine can play a big role here" (NATO). Finland, whose own national law restricts firing towards the Russian border, is speeding up drone-production cooperation with Kyiv on a separate track (YLE).

The EU is trying to build a parallel route. On May 5, the European Commission opened its call for founding members of an EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance, with a May 25 deadline (European Commission). France and Germany, however, are wary of giving Brussels a coordinating role in defence, preferring NATO or smaller formats they can shape more directly (Lowy Institute). The result is three tracks running at once: NATO, the EU, and bilateral deals. None has yet produced joined-up coverage.

A Gap That Maps Onto Geography

The effect is a two-tier alliance. Countries with their own air forces, such as Poland and Finland, can act nationally when drones cross their borders. Poland has already shot down at least three Russian drones over its territory. Countries without their own air power, including Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, remain inside NATO's consensus-bound chain of command, which proved too slow for a threat measured in minutes.

On May 15, eastern Latvia faced another drone alert. NATO jets scrambled again. The gap exposed on May 7 was still there (LSM). The drones keep arriving, while an alliance designed to deter armed attack has not agreed what to do when a cheap unmanned aircraft flies low over a member state's city at night. The bilateral push may eventually cover that weakness. For now, the countries closest to the threat have the least authority to protect themselves.