Latvia and Romania, two member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), said Russian drones violated their airspace over the weekend. This could lead to renewed tensions between Moscow and the military alliance.
The Latvian government announced on Sunday that a Russian drone, presumably flying in from Belarus, had crashed over the eastern half of the country the day before.
Separately, the Romanian Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that “criminal” Russian drones had entered Romanian airspace and attacked Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.
Mircea Geoana, NATO’s outgoing deputy secretary general and former Romanian top diplomat, said the military alliance condemned Russia’s violation of Romanian airspace.
“While we have no intelligence indicating a deliberate attack by Russia against allies, these actions are irresponsible and potentially dangerous,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Article 5 of NATO stipulates that in the event of an attack, all member states will come to the aid of a NATO country.
“I would be more concerned about Latvia,” Andrew D’Anieri, resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, told Fox News Digital. “It’s a long way from Ukraine. You have to go through Belarus to get from Ukraine to Latvia.”
“If you were trying to test NATO’s Article 5, you would do it by essentially launching a fully equipped drone into Latvian airspace and waiting for the Russians to respond as a kind of low-risk move.”
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Firefighters extinguish a fire in trucks at a site where storage facilities were hit by a Russian drone strike in the village of Murovane outside Lviv, Ukraine, on September 6, 2024.
The Latvian military also stated that there was no evidence that Moscow or Minsk had intentionally flown a drone into the country.
“There’s certainly a possibility that it was intentional,” D’Anieri claimed. “I think the Latvians want to control their response in some way. If you say, ‘Oh, the Russians tried to attack us with a drone,’ then that requires a much bigger response. So I think cooler heads prevail at the moment, but more information could come to light, or we could certainly see this again in the next few months.”
The Romanian Defense Ministry said Russia attacked Ukraine near its border in the early hours of Sunday and that two Romanian F-16 bombers took off from an air base at around 2:30 a.m. local time to “monitor the situation.”
Fragments of the drone were found in a Romanian village near the Danube. Officials are currently conducting searches in a second area where fragments may have fallen.
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While incidents like this would have been “unthinkable” three years ago, “today they are treated as routine,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis wrote in a post to X on Sunday.
Russia is launching one of the most violent attacks of the war against Ukraine, while Vladimir Putin is furious at Kyiv’s invasion of his territory in the Kursk region. (East2West)
“Nothing should land in Ukraine, Latvia or anywhere else on NATO territory, but our inaction has made this the new reality. Lithuania will, of course, support a strong Allied response.”
Ukraine’s new Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the incidents were a “stark reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions extend beyond Ukraine.”
The war has intensified in recent weeks as Russia launched large-scale attacks on Ukraine’s key infrastructure and came close to capturing Pokrovsk, a key transportation hub that could secure Russia’s control over the Donetsk region.
The Russians are advancing on Ukraine’s front lines in the east and trying to take control of the entire Donbass region.
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Meanwhile, Ukraine is stepping up its long-range attacks into Russia’s interior and pressing its Western allies to lift restrictions on the use of weapons they supply to launch attacks deep inside Russia.
