WASHINGTON—Yesterday, a Romanian F-16 deployed to NATO’s Baltic air policing mission shot down a drone over Estonia. Earlier today, Lithuanians in Vilnius rushed to take shelter after a drone incursion was detected. Since March, a series of drone overflights in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland has turned the Baltic region into a test case for how Russia seeks to exploit the secondary effects of Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against its war economy.
Increasingly, the drones entering Baltic airspace appear to be Ukrainian drones redirected or disrupted by Russian electronic warfare as they fly toward targets inside Russia. Moscow now actively uses these cases to increase pressure against the Baltic states, aiming to redirect the political costs of Ukraine’s successful campaign away from itself and onto NATO’s eastern flank.
Russia’s pressure as a vulnerability deflection
That effort reflects a broader shift in the war: Russia’s vulnerabilities are becoming harder to hide as Ukraine increasingly imposes costs where Moscow feels them most—on the economic infrastructure that finances its aggression. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ukraine’s expanding campaign against Russia’s energy sector. Recent Ukrainian drone strikes have hit Russia’s refining base from Perm and Tuapse to Nizhny Novgorod, Kirishi, Saratov, Volgograd, and Ufa. Ukrainian strikes have also disrupted gas-processing and condensate facilities in Astrakhan and Ust-Luga; and they have targeted oil-pumping stations, export terminals, tankers, and shadow-fleet-linked maritime infrastructure on the Baltic and Black seas.
The Kremlin is responding with a proven strategy—masking its growing vulnerabilities by escalating threats. As the incoming Ukrainian drones face Russian jamming and spoofing to reroute them, they increasingly stray into Baltic airspace. Russian messaging then recasts those incidents as supposed evidence that the Baltic states are allowing Ukraine to use their airspace for attacks on Russia—an allegation Baltic leaders have repeatedly and firmly denied. In recent days and weeks, Russia’s messaging has increasingly been followed by threats of retaliation.
Russia’s apparent goal is to redirect political costs from itself to Ukraine’s strongest supporters. Russia wants Baltic citizens to ask whether support for Ukraine is now bringing the war into their own skies. It wants the publics of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to lose confidence in their institutions. It wants governments already operating under pressure—especially Latvia, now coping with political instability—to be forced into defensive explanations rather than strategic action. Above all, Moscow wants to create friction between the Baltic states, other NATO allies, and Ukraine at precisely the moment when Ukraine’s long-range campaign is proving effective.
Strategic clarity and operational fixes
To manage this evolving situation, two main lines of effort are needed. The first is preserving strategic clarity. Ukraine has every right to strike legitimate military and war-sustaining targets inside Russia. Russia chose this war, and it continues to attack Ukrainian cities, energy infrastructure, and civilians. The Kremlin cannot be allowed to treat its own oil-export system as politically untouchable while it targets Ukraine with impunity. Ukraine’s long-range campaign is not an expansion of the war but an effort to impose consequences on the state that started it.
This strategic clarity must be matched by immediate fixes of the Baltic states’ counter-drone defenses. The Baltic states cannot afford a gap between political solidarity with Ukraine and the practical protection of their own airspace. Public resilience depends on visible competence: Citizens need to see that their skies are monitored, alerts are credible, local authorities know what to do, and that any drone—whether a malign Russian drone or a rerouted Ukrainian one—is detected and dealt with quickly and professionally.
That makes closing the counter-drone gap the immediate policy priority. NATO air policing remains essential, but fighter jets are an expensive tool against small and inexpensive unmanned systems. What the Baltic region needs is a layered counter-drone architecture: better low-altitude detection, mobile interception teams, electronic-warfare monitoring, rapid attribution mechanisms, and proven civil-military engagement protocols. The objective should be to ensure that drones are detected, classified, and neutralized before they become political crises and thus a gain for Russia.
This capability should be built with Ukraine. No country in Europe has more operational experience against Russian drones, jamming, spoofing, and adaptive electronic-warfare tactics. The technological know-how that allows Ukraine to sustain pressure on Russia’s war economy can help the Baltic states harden themselves against the spillover and manipulation that Moscow is deliberately engineering.