In what has nearly turn out to be a routine incidence, navy drones concerned within the Russia-Ukraine struggle have once more crashed in NATO territory. On Could 7, two drones entered Latvia from Russian airspace, one in every of them exploding at an empty oil storage facility. Fortunately, nobody was injured, however the incursion is a part of a troubling sample—one which highlights the insufficient tempo of European navy planners’ efforts to place countermeasures in place.
For the reason that starting of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, incidents like this one have occurred nearly too usually to depend. Simply weeks after the struggle started, a drone, probably Ukrainian, flew undetected for a whole lot of kilometers over Romania, Hungary and Croatia earlier than crashing close to Zagreb. Russian drones crashed in Romania in 2023, and in Poland and Lithuania in 2025. In March, a Ukrainian drone struck the chimney of an influence station in Estonia. One other drone veered off-course in April, coming down in Finland.
Probably the most egregious incident occurred on Sept. 9, 2025, when not less than 19 drones entered Polish airspace from Belarus. They have been later recognized as Russian Gerberas, an unarmed variant of the Iranian-made Shahed 136, a one-way “kamikaze” assault drone. In response, Polish F-16s have been scrambled, helped by a number of aerial property from different NATO states, most notably Dutch F-35s, which along with the Polish F-16 shot down three of the drones.
