Latvia and Romania, two member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), said Russian drones violated their airspace over the weekend in a move that could stoke boiling-hot tensions between Moscow and the military alliance.
Latvia’s government said Sunday a Russian drone had fallen over the east of the country the previous day, likely crossing in from Belarus.
Separately, on Sunday, Romania’s foreign ministry said “criminal” Russian airborne drones encroached on its airspace while targeting Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.
Mircea Geoana, the outgoing deputy secretary general of NATO and Romania’s former top diplomat, said the military alliance condemned Russia’s violation of Romanian airspace.
“While we have no information indicating an intentional attack by Russia against allies, these acts are irresponsible and potentially dangerous,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Article 5 of NATO stipulates that if a NATO country is attacked, all member nations will come to its defense.
“The one I would be more concerned about is Latvia,” Andrew D’Anieri, resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, told Fox News Digital. “It’s a country away from Ukraine. You have to go through all of Belarus to get to Latvia from Ukraine.”
“If you were going to try to test NATO’s Article 5, you do it by sending a fully strapped drone essentially, and having it kind of just veer into Latvian airspace and see what the reaction is as kind of a low-risk move by the Russians.”
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Firefighters extinguish fire in trucks at a site where warehouse facilities were hit during a Russian drone strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in the village of Murovane, outside of Lviv, Ukraine Sept. 6, 2024.
Latvia’s military also said there were no indications that Moscow or Minsk purposely directed a drone into the country.
“There’s certainly a chance it was intentional,” claimed D’Anieri. “I think the Latvians want to kind of manage their response. If you say, ‘Oh, the Russians tried to hit us with a drone,’ then that demands a much greater response. So I think cooler heads right now are prevailing, but there could be more info that comes out, or we could certainly see this again over the next several months.”
Romania’s defense ministry said Russia attacked Ukraine close to its border in the early hours of Sunday, and two Romanian F-16s took off from an airbase to “monitor the situation” around 2:30 a.m. local time.
Fragments from the drone were found in a Romanian village near the Danube River, and officials are conducting searches in a second area where fragments may have fallen.
While incidents such as this would have been “unthinkable” three years ago, they “are now treated as routine,” Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis wrote in a post to X on Sunday.
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“Nothing should be landing on Ukraine, or Latvia, or anywhere on NATO territory, but this is the new reality our inaction has allowed to emerge. Lithuania will, of course, be supporting a strong allied response.”
Ukraine’s new foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha‎, said the incidents served as a ​​”stark reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions extend beyond Ukraine.”
The war has intensified in recent weeks as Russia has launched large-scale strikes on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and closed in on the capture of Pokrovsk, a key transportation hub that could lock up its control of the Donetsk region.
The Russians are advancing on Ukraine’s frontlines in the east in an effort to take control of the whole of the Donbas region.
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Ukraine, meanwhile, has been stepping up its long-range strikes inside Russia and urging its western allies to lift restrictions on using the weapons they provide to strike deep into Russia.