Baltic drone crashes unlock €12 billion defence push

An armed drone carrying explosives blew up on Latvian soil last week. No air-defence system stopped it. Two days later, Commission President 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 test a hard question: whether Baltic air defence is still built for the wrong war. NATO's Baltic air mission has guarded the region since 2004, mainly against Russian fighter jets. It has no settled procedure for Ukrainian drones pushed off course by Russian jamming.

A policing mission meets a drone war

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

The mechanism is not speculative. Russia has expanded its GPS-spoofing antenna network in Kaliningrad from three to 36 units in one year. That is enough to confuse a drone's navigation and push it westwards, away from Russian airspace and towards NATO territory.

On 19 May, a Romanian F-16 flying 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.

An Estonian commander said the operation worked partly because of "favourable weather." Peacetime rules require visual identification before firing. Clear skies made that possible. In cloud or at night, the same drone would probably have flown on.

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

The three Baltic presidents want more than a procedural adjustment. On 21 May, they called for NATO to upgrade Air Policing into a full Air Defence mission, with local commanders authorised to engage threats, permanent fighter basing, and integrated counter-drone systems.

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

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

For Malta, which sits inside the EU but outside NATO, this is the part that matters. Brussels can put money on the table, but it cannot decide who pulls the trigger. Von der Leyen's Vilnius package included SAFE defence loans, the EU's new instrument for member-state arms purchases, for all three Baltic states, plus €1.5 billion in redirected EU cohesion funds.

Her call for a "unified drone alert system" sounded more operational than it is. The Commission said it "could initiate" an assessment. No legislative proposal followed. Under the EU treaties, air defence remains with member states and NATO. The Commission can help buy equipment; it cannot command an intercept.

Defence Commissioner Kubilius has launched an EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance and a separate drone defence initiative aimed at building capability by the end of 2027. Both are industrial coordination tools, meant to accelerate production. Neither decides who fires at what.

Six counter-drone systems are now being built at the same time along NATO's eastern flank: 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 are funding these national purchases without conditions requiring interoperability. That leaves Europe with more hardware, but not necessarily a single working system.

The unresolved issue is attribution. Ukrainian drones, diverted by Russian jamming, are arriving on NATO soil as armed munitions. Whether Moscow intends that result, or simply creates the conditions while protecting its own airspace, will shape the debate at NATO's Ankara summit in July.

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