Ukraine war crosses borders and brings NATO-Russia conflict closer

Repeated violations of Nato airspace by foreign drones have raised fears of a clash between the military alliance and Russia, with Moscow accusing Ukraine of using the Baltic countries as launchpads for attacks.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are at risk of being drawn further into the Ukraine war as their near-neighbours escalate drone attacks against each other, with munitions frequently crossing the Baltic states’ borders, sparking alarm among their governments and publics.

A drone incursion on Wednesday caused the closure of public buildings across Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, with senior government officials forced to wait out the incident in an underground shelter. On Tuesday, Nato planes shot down a drone over Estonia for the first time.

And last week, the government of Latvia collapsed following a row over its handling of drone incursions.

Baltic governments say that some of the drones have come from Russia, but in many cases, they have originated from Ukraine itself.

Kyiv has apologised and offered to send experts to support local anti-drone operations. This week, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said Russia was using electronic warfare capabilities to “redirect Ukrainian drones into the Baltics”.

This murky picture has raised the threat of a direct confrontation between Nato and Russia.

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service has said, without providing evidence, that Ukraine has not only established an “air corridor” over the Baltics but planned to launch drones from Latvia, with Riga’s permission.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, has claimed that Kyiv is using Baltic airspace to launch attacks against targets in western Russia, including its Baltic Sea fuel terminals.

Moscow’s UN ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, warned: “The coordinates of decision-making centres in Latvia are well known, and membership in Nato will not protect you from retaliation.”

At the same time, influential media figures close to the Kremlin have called for strikes on Baltic territory, ostensibly against enemy drones. The three Baltic countries have issued a joint denial of Moscow’s claims, calling them “dangerous lies” and have asked the European Parliament to condemn Russia’s threats.

A foreign ministry official from one of the Baltic nations told The i Paper that Russian threats have escalated steadily over the past two months, alongside so-called “grey zone” attacks such as arson attacks on their territory.

Their government supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself and believes the drone incidents are accidents, the official said. But they have asked Kyiv to do more to prevent them, such as changing flight paths to travel further away from their borders.

The escalating tensions are causing public alarm, said Meelis Oidsalu, editor-in-chief of the Baltic Sentinel defence news outlet and a 21-year veteran of Estonia’s defence ministry.

“In Estonia alone, there have been five Ukraine-war drone-related incidents since August last year,” he told The i Paper. “As the pace and volume of Ukrainian long-range attacks have increased, so has public concern.”

Oidsalu said that the first Nato shootdown of a drone over his country’s airspace this week followed a public campaign to “close Estonian skies to Ukrainian drones”. But he said his team had found no evidence to support Russia’s claim that Baltic governments were allowing Ukraine to use their airspace.

Some military analysts, however, say Ukraine may be making deliberate use of Baltic airspace, which could allow shorter and safer flight paths as well as a surprise line of attack against Russian targets.

Colonel Markus Reisner, who studies the Russia-Ukraine war and oversees officer training at Austria’s Theresian Military Academy, said there was likely to be some covert operations over the Baltics but Russia was seeking to “make the most of them” to distract from the failure of its air-defence systems to repel drone attacks, as well as a lack of progress on the battlefield.

Kyiv has been able to hit a string of high-value energy targets along Russia’s Baltic coastline this year.

Reisner added that any such operations were likely to be small-scale. “If swarms of drones were flying [over the border], we would see these images,” he said.

Marina Miron of the War Studies Department at King’s College London said any arrangement would be informal rather than by official agreement. “Maybe it was something done by the intelligence services through back channels… to use the air space as an enabler,” she said.

Miron suggested that Russian responses in the short term are likely to take the form of deniable grey zone attacks, rather than strikes on Baltic territory. But she added that tensions are rising between Moscow and the region over other issues, including the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad that sits between Poland and Lithuania.

Lithuania’s foreign minister, Kestutis Budrys, threatened Russian control of the territory in an interview this week.

“We must show the Russians that we can break through the small fortress they have built in Kaliningrad,” he told Swiss newspaper ​Neue Zürcher Zeitung. “Nato has the means to raze Russian air defence bases and missile systems to the ground if necessary,” Budrys added.

The Kremlin called the comments “insanity”, while Grigory Karasin, the head of Russia’s Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, said they could be the basis for a new “limited military operation”.

Another senior foreign policy official, Leonid Slutsky, said if Kaliningrad was threatened by Nato, Russia’s “military and nuclear doctrines will inevitably come into play”.

As tensions rise, Baltic governments are confident that Nato, and its Article Five mutual defence pact, can be counted on for support in a conflict with Russia, said Oidsalu, citing recent military exercises in the region and troop reinforcements. But several recent assessments have suggested that Nato support can’t be relied upon.

A war game convened by the German government showed Russian forces were able to seize the Baltic states before help arrived, and hold onto them via nuclear threats. A research paper from the Baltic Defence Initiative, a Lithuania-based think-tank, suggested Russia could capture the three countries in a matter of months, with Western Nato leaders unwilling to fight over the alliance’s eastern flank.

Donald Trump’s recent moves to reduce American troop presence in Europe have added to the anxiety. “The problem and the big question for Nato is how far the US is going to participate in any potential violation of Nato sovereignty,” said Miron.