The Baltic States activated, in the early hours of this Wednesday, various air alerts after the detection of drones near their borders and over their airspace, which led to launching the NATO mission in the area, in a context marked by the Ukrainian offensive against Russia following the attacks on the strategic port of Ust-Luga, in the Leningrad region.
The Armed Forces of Latvia stated that three drones entered their airspace, two of them for a very brief time, while the third remained in the area longer and also reached overfly Lithuania and Estonia.
"In response to the threat posed by this drone, NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission fighter jets were activated in Lithuania, which continued with the response measures while the drone overflew Latvia's airspace," the Latvian Army has reported, adding that the drones arrived from Belarus, although it has linked this incident to the Ukrainian bombings in Russia.
The Latvian Army added that "the appropriate operating conditions were not in place to destroy the drone" and that the device ultimately "left Latvian airspace and continued its flight toward Estonia".
Estonian authorities, for their part, indicated that sirens and warnings to the population remained active in several counties during part of the early morning, until 6:00 a.m., also linking these alerts to the attack with Ukrainian drones on the port of Ust-Luga.
In statements to the ERR network, a spokesperson for the Estonian Army confirmed that warnings were issued to residents of the affected areas, following the threat alerts previously launched in Latvia and Lithuania.
SITUATION IN LITHUANIA
In Lithuania, the director of the National Crisis Management Centre, Vilmantas Vitkauskas, confirmed the location of three drones in the border area with Belarus, specifying that none of them entered Lithuanian territory. "One of them entered Latvia and then flew north toward Russia. During the first incident, residents in the regions of Vilnius and Utena were alerted," he explained to the LRT broadcaster.
According to Vitkauskas, a second incident would also have involved a violation of airspace, which led to the takeoff of fighter jets with the objective of neutralizing the device. "The fighter jets were about to come into contact with it. But the reason they didn't shoot it down could be due to bad weather conditions, or perhaps it was an area in which shooting down a drone would have been dangerous," he argued.
Air traffic restrictions resulting from these incidents caused incidents at the Vilna airport, where three flights scheduled for Tuesday night had to be cancelled, affecting around 465 passengers. In contrast, the Kaunas airport operated normally and did not record any changes due to this situation.