Drone Blast Exposes Latvia's Radar Gap

On the morning of 23 May, people living near Lake Drīdzis in eastern Latvia heard the kind of sound that is supposed to be caught by the state before it reaches a village. An unmanned aircraft carrying explosives had crossed from Belarus, flown about 20 kilometres through NATO airspace, and dropped into the lake. It exploded on impact.

Nobody was injured. The awkward part for Riga was how the alarm was raised. Latvia's National Armed Forces told the LETA news agency that their sensors had not detected the drone. Local residents called the police after hearing the blast. No mobile public warning went out.

A Month of Incursions

Lake Drīdzis was not an isolated failure. It came at the end of a month in which armed drones repeatedly entered Baltic airspace, exposing a gap between NATO's formal protection of its eastern flank and the tools actually watching the sky.

On 7 May, a drone hit an oil depot in Rēzekne, Latvia, prompting the defence minister's resignation and ultimately bringing down the government. Latvia is now being run by a caretaker cabinet, with no successor coalition in sight. On 17 May, a drone entered Lithuanian airspace and was seen by civilians rather than military radar. Finland briefly shut its southern airspace on 15 May after warnings that an armed drone was inbound.

There was one clear success. On 19 May, Estonian radar picked up a drone approaching from the east. NATO scrambled Romanian F-16s from Lithuania, and one air-to-air missile brought it down over an Estonian field. Three countries acted within 70 minutes.

The difference was simple. Estonia's sensors saw the drone. In Latvia and Lithuania, they did not.

Built for Bombers, Facing Drones

NATO keeps fighter jets in the Baltic states on rotating deployments under its Air Policing mission. In peacetime, those aircraft identify and shadow planes that stray into allied airspace. The model was built for Russian bombers testing Nordic and Baltic defences, not for small drones flying low enough to slip beneath conventional radar coverage.

On 21 May, the three Baltic presidents asked NATO to upgrade Air Policing into an Air Defence Mission. That would give commanders standing authority to shoot down threats, instead of waiting for political approval case by case.

Such a change needs agreement from all 32 NATO allies, and no decision has been made. NATO secretary general Mark Rutte has framed the July summit in Ankara as a review of drone defence rather than a mandate change.

National capitals are moving faster than the alliance. Poland's Donald Tusk has warned that the threat of provocations on NATO's eastern flank "is becoming a fact", and Warsaw is building its own anti-drone shield along the border. Lithuania has begun deploying Saab Giraffe 1X low-altitude radars to cover the 30-to-300-metre band where these drones fly, but integration will take months.

For states on the eastern flank, the problem is no longer theoretical. The collective system is still discussing mandates while national governments are buying equipment.

Billions for Missiles, Pennies for Warnings

The same gap appears on the civilian side. Latvia is negotiating a multi-billion-euro EU defence loan for military hardware. But EU telecoms law required every member state to have a mobile public warning system in place by June 2022. By mid-2025, seven countries still had not complied, including Latvia and Finland. The European Commission has not opened enforcement proceedings against any of them.

Latvia sent its first-ever cell-broadcast test message in July 2025, for a weather warning. The system is still only partly deployed. When the drone hit Lake Drīdzis, residents received no automated alert. They heard the explosion and called the police.

Latvia's government fell after the Rēzekne strike. Three weeks later, the caretaker cabinet that replaced it watched another armed drone cross the border unseen.