NATO concerned by Baltic drone incidents, German military chief says

The recent drone incidents in the Baltic states have caused concern among NATO allies, according to Germany’s military chief Carsten Breuer.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Drone Summit in the Latvian capital Riga on Wednesday, Breuer told dpa that he had noticed this on the Latvian side and in Germany, but also at recent NATO meetings.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania border Russia and its ally Belarus. In recent weeks, Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles launched as part of attacks on targets in north-western Russia have repeatedly entered the airspace of the EU and NATO countries and, in some cases, crashed.

Moscow has held the Baltic states partly responsible, accusing them of supporting Ukrainian drone attacks and making their airspace and territory available for this purpose. It even openly threatened Latvia with retaliation.

The governments in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius dismissed the Russian allegations as lies and condemned the threats, as did the European Union and NATO.

Breuer, who took part in a panel discussion at the Drone Summit, sees the Russian allegations as a hybrid attack.

“In all areas, we are in a state that is no longer quite peace, but not yet war either,” he said, adding that all NATO states are subject to hybrid attacks.

The only remedy, he said, is “information, information, information.” Only through information can we succeed in exposing and unmasking things, as well as making the true intentions behind them clear, the military chief said.