Belarus Drone Detonates in Latvian Lake

On the morning of 23 May, an unmanned aircraft carrying explosives entered Latvian airspace from Belarus, flew about 20 kilometres over NATO territory without setting off a single military sensor, and crashed into Lake Drīdzis in eastern Latvia. It exploded on impact. No one was injured.

Latvia's National Armed Forces told LETA that their sensors had not detected the drone. The warning came from residents, who heard the blast and called the police. No cell-broadcast alert was sent.

A month of incursions

Lake Drīdzis is the latest case in a month in which armed drones have repeatedly entered Baltic airspace. On 7 May, a drone hit an oil depot in Rēzekne, Latvia, forcing the defence minister's resignation and eventually bringing down the government. Latvia is now being run by a caretaker cabinet, with no replacement coalition yet in sight.

On 17 May, a drone crossed into Lithuanian airspace and was seen by civilians, not military radar. Finland briefly closed its southern airspace on 15 May after warnings that an armed drone was approaching.

One interception did work. On 19 May, Estonian radar tracked a drone coming from the east. NATO scrambled Romanian F-16s from their base in Lithuania, and one air-to-air missile brought it down over an Estonian field. Three countries coordinated the response within 70 minutes.

The difference was basic. 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 Air Policing, a peacetime mission meant to identify and shadow aircraft that enter allied airspace. The system was designed for Russian bombers testing Nordic defences, not for small drones flying at heights where conventional radar struggles to follow them.

On 21 May, the three Baltic presidents called on NATO to upgrade this into an Air Defence Mission, with standing authority to shoot down threats without waiting for political approval case by case. That change needs agreement from all 32 NATO allies. No decision has been taken.

Secretary General Mark Rutte has presented the Ankara Summit in July as a review of drone defence, not as a decision to change the mandate.

National governments are already moving. 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 started deploying Giraffe 1X low-altitude radars from Saab to cover the 30-to-300-metre band where these drones fly. Integration will take months. The national response is moving faster than the collective one.

Billions for missiles, pennies for warnings

The gap between military and civilian preparedness is just as visible in the money. Latvia is negotiating a multi-billion-euro EU defence loan for military hardware. On the civilian side, EU telecoms law required every member state to build mobile public warning systems by June 2022.

By mid-2025, seven countries still had not complied, including Latvia and Finland. The European Commission has not opened enforcement action against any of them.

Latvia sent its first-ever cell-broadcast test message in July 2025, for a weather warning. The system remains only partly deployed. When the drone hit Lake Drīdzis, no automated alert reached residents.

They heard the explosion and called the police themselves.

Latvia's government fell after the Rēzekne strike. Three weeks later, the caretaker cabinet that replaced it saw another armed drone fly in undetected.