The Decibel - The growing concern over stray drone strikes in Europe

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

Drones have become a part of everyday life for many Ukrainians. Now, they’re showing up in the airspace of Baltic countries. On Wednesday, people in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, were instructed to take shelter when drone activity was detected near the border with Belarus. The day before, a NATO jet shot down a Ukrainian drone over southern Estonia. This followed an incident earlier this month when two drones hit an empty oil facility in Latvia. It’s still not clear exactly how these drones are ending up in Baltic airspace, but some analysts believe the drones could be autonomously choosing their targets – a potential first in warfare. Mark MacKinnon is the Globe’s senior international correspondent. He’s here to explain what we know so far about how these drones are ending up in NATO countries, and what the implications are for the next phase of the Russia-Ukraine war. Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ukrainian drones aimed at Russian targets have been ending up in neighboring Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia recently. And this drone activity over these Baltic countries, which are also all NATO members, could escalate the Russian war in Ukraine. At this point, it's not entirely clear how or why those drones are ending up in Baltic airspace. But some analysts believe that at least two of these drones might be choosing. their targets on their own using AI. The Globe's senior international correspondent, Mark McKinnon, is here to talk about what's been going on and what this could mean for the next phase of the war. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail.

Hi, Mark. Thanks for being here. Hi, Cheryl. Thank you. So, Mark, just to note that things are moving fast and you and I are talking midday on Wednesday. But there has been a lot of drone activity over the Baltic states. Can you catch us up on what's going on? Yeah. I mean, this has been sort of an ongoing issue for the last sort of seven, actually the last couple of weeks. The episode that drew most people's attention to it was now May the 7th, and that saw a pair of Ukrainian drones attack hit an empty oil facility in eastern Latvia. That was sort of the one that caught everyone's attention.

We've actually seen since then and even before then, just this stream of drones, most of them fired from Ukraine, aimed at targets in Russia. But even just today, a few hours before our conversation, they had the first air raid sirens in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, and people had to go into air raid shelters there. Yesterday, 24 hours ago, in Estonian airspace, there was another drone, Ukrainian in origin that was shot down by NATO fighter jets, in this case a Romanian fighter jet. plus we've seen more episodes in Latvian airspace. So it's an incredibly tense moment for those three small Baltic states, which are the eastern edge of both the European Union and the NATO military alliance, but right up against the border with Russia, which of course has been at war with Ukraine for the last four years.

Yeah, can you get into a little bit more? What's the significance of the Baltic states in this war? And why is this drone activity a big deal? I mean, the Baltic states themselves are, as I mentioned, or the eastern edge of NATO. And so they've always been in a precarious position with Vladimir Putin speaking repeatedly about the fall of the Soviet Union as having been a catastrophe, which sort of speaks to a territorial ambition in those areas.

But what's happened most recently is Ukraine has been conducting a series of long-range drone strikes that have been quite successful hitting targets across Russia. They've hit oil facilities. They've hit military factories. They've hit Moscow increasingly. Bringing the war to Russia, which is their aim is to sort of make Russians feel the pain, the terror that Ukrainians have been living with for the last four years. One of their main targets, though, is the oil industry because this is where, from a Ukrainian point of view, this is what funds the Russian war machine that attacks their country. And there are some crucial oil export terminals near St. Petersburg.

They're called Usuluga and Primork. And the Ukrainian drones firing north from Ukraine towards these two oil terminals, they fly road. right along often the border between the Baltic states and Russia, which has led to this series of episodes as Russian jamming measures known as electronic warfare have knocked some of the drones off course. And in this one famous episode now in Latvia, set off a series of events that saw the drones hit a Latvian oil facility instead of a Russian one. Okay.

Let's zoom into that situation and what happened. So this was earlier this month, like I said, a pair of drones. Tell us what happened. So this was May the 7th. And what we know, the first drone entered Latvian airspace and sped into this oil facility and detonated hitting this oil facility in eastern Latvia, very close to a major Latvian city. And then about 10 minutes later, a second drone flew in and hit the same target. That's, I think, quite important. This was not an accidental landing.

Let's put it that way. And then a third drone entered and later sort of redirected away from the target. And, you know, what exactly happened with that drone? We don't know how or why. but there's a couple of theories that have come out about what happened there. And the official version from the Ukrainians, which is one that NATO members are publicly endorsing, is that Russia somehow took over the control of these drones and directed them at a target in Latvia, which has a whole bunch of implications on its own.

I mean, is this Russia attacking a NATO member? What exactly happened here? But when I was in Riga last week, the director of, it's called NATO's Strategic Communication Center of Excellence. he's someone who is not an expert in drone warfare necessarily, but is someone who focuses on communications and cyber war and increasingly on artificial intelligence. And he told me that, and he would have access, obviously, to a lot of NATO internal intelligence.

He told me that a much more plausible version was that these drones, having been scrambled by GPS jamming or whatever happened to them, the AI on board of these drones selected a different target and one that looked like the original target would happen to be in a different country. So Kiev is saying that the drones were intentionally redirected into Latvia by Russian electronic warfare measures. But then there's this other theory that perhaps they were scrambled and then

the AI decided to target something else. Yeah. And I mean, I think both can be quite true in that it was Russian jamming that would have knocked these drones off course and had them searching for a new target. The Ukrainian version of events relies on Russia having made a leap forward in technology that they haven't demonstrated outside of this potential event where they can sort of take over a drone mid-flight and not only scramble it off target, and which we've seen a lot of that, both sides do this. The Ukrainians jam, Russian drones coming into Ukraine. This is how they end up wandering into Poland as we've seen back last fall or just harmlessly crashing in the middle of nowhere.

In this case, though, like I said, it was two drones that specifically hit the same facility 10 minutes apart. So it's not an accidental landing. And that's led to, you know, the Ukrainian version is that the Russian somehow found a way to direct this drone, which would be a leap forward in terms of electronic warfare. The other, and I'm told, more plausible explanation, is that the AI, having been scrambled, looking for an oil facility, not, you know, having its GPS capabilities, having been disabled somehow, saw something that looked a lot like what it was supposed to hit and flew towards it. What was the response in Latvia like?

So this has triggered a political crisis in Latvia. Whatever the, you know, whatever happened to those specific drones, the Latvian people, the Latvian population was alarmed by a couple of things. The first was this first drone strikes, then a second drone strikes, and only then does the air raid alarm go off. And this, like I said, people were, it's a major city that these oil facilities on the edge of in eastern Latvia. People heard the explosions, heard another explosion. Some, you know, I'm told, thought that a big war had begun.

and only then did they get any kind of air raid siren, and no one took any action to shoot down these drones. So in 48 hours later, the prime minister of Latvia asked for her defense minister to resign. He did that, but then he was the head of a parliamentary faction that was propping up the Latvian government. So he pulled his left-wing party out of the center-right coalition,

which has led to the prime minister resigning, which now has, you know, the entire Latvian government really in crisis. There's going to be a caretaker government will be arranged. I'm sure there were going to be elections in the fall anyway. So, you know, it's more of a symbol of just how shocking this incident was than any sort of harbinger of prolonged instability in Latvia. Okay, so this has caused quite a crisis in the government in Latvia. I'm also wondering, was anybody hurt in the drone strikes? No, thankfully, there was no one in the oil facilities.

This is the middle of the night when this attack happened. Of course, just raises the level of concern. if either version of events happened, if either the Russians have gained the ability to redirect drones or AI as choosing targets on its own after being scrambled, it wouldn't matter much if it hits the building that people were in. It would just be, you know, could obviously have caused a major crisis. How was Russia responded to this? Well, Russia has, Russia's kind of responded to the Ukraine response, if that makes sense. So in the wake of this incident, Ukraine both apologized, said that, of course, acknowledge these Ukrainian drones, said the Russians had redirected these and then sent experts to Latvia to help them prepare their defenses for future episodes. You know, the Ukrainians are obviously the world leading experts right now in both drone warfare and counter-drone

measures. From the Russian point of view, there are now going to be Ukrainian drone warriors, for want of a better term, stationed in Latvia and the official task news service, the Russian ambassador of the United Nations, have both sort of pointed at this and said, this is, Ukraine planning to launch drones at us from Latvia, which would be an act of war. We will respond accordingly. You know, there's been a lot of rhetoric like this from the Kremlin over the past four years, over the past, you know, 12 years dating back to the annexation of Crimea and the start, real start of this conflict.

So it's hard to sometimes measure what's new and what's really dangerous. But, you know, I think for people living in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, right now, this does feel like a very tense moment. We'll be right back. I'm very fixated on this point about this drone, perhaps choosing its target, becoming autonomous. What does that mean? Like, can you explain that a little bit more? Like, if this is actually what happened, what does it mean if a drone is autonomously selecting a target?

Well, I mean, to the extent that I can, you know, try and explain what I think the theory is here, I mean, I've witnessed drone launching missions. I've gone, sort of been embedded with Ukrainian military units when they've been launching drones in the direction of Russia. and then at some point, because they're launching these drones hundreds of kilometers, sometimes more than that, away from where they started off, they've programmed in a flight path. They've programmed in what the target's supposed to look like. But they rely on AI for that, too.

They're like, you know, give us a flight path that, you know, goes this direction, but avoids these following concentrations of air defense that we're aware of, and, you know, the target's going to look like this. But after that, they lose control. not someone standing with a joystick and moving these drones around like happens actually closer to the front line with these sort of shorter range drones. There really is like sort of a soldier who's standing behind the trench sort of directing the drone at the enemy. In this case, they fire them away and they sort of cross their fingers. And the team I was out with,

I remember they were monitoring sort of Russian social media in the city of Tvera, which was what they'd launched the drones at. And they were waiting to see, you know, oh gosh, people in Tavaa are saying there was a big explosion. And that's how they knew they'd hit something. So they really do sort of hand off these drones. They fire them off in space and they sort of wait and see what happens. AI is taking over from there. You know, the head of the NATO Stratcom Center said to me,

it's more convenient to accept the Ukrainian version here because then, you know, the Russians are the bad guys as usual. But actually, it may be that this is a bit reckless, that those are my words, not his, to be firing these drones along the territory of an ally with, you know, no longer being in control of them once they're up there. If that's what happens, you can, you know, the potential consequences are quite worrying if a drone, say,

is flying hundreds of kilometers away and it was sent to hit a military base. It might just look for, you know, what a military base from above, photograph from above, that can look a lot like a campsite. Or the Canadian military base in Latvia might look a lot like the target of one of these drones supposed to hit a Russian military base in Russia. You can see how something like this could, A, lead to either to, to civilian casualties or be some major international crisis that no one meant to instigate. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, there's very serious consequences there. And, I mean, Mark, we know that Ukraine is kind of at the forefront of using drones and wars. And part of the way they've done this is by getting weapons out on the battlefield really fast, I mean, in part because of necessity, right? But, I mean, what you're explaining here feels a little bit worrying that perhaps things are moving too fast. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I think that's absolutely true. And in this war, technology has been leaping forward, especially the last two years or so, where, you know, at the start of the invasion, drones were reconnaissance only. And you sort of see them floating over the battlefield. And that was used to help artillery target or to redirect a column of tanks looking where the enemy was, that sort of thing. And then we saw the advent of these Shahed drones that were sort of slow-moving, explosive. dangerous, but only if they sort of, you know, were scored a direct hit. But the evolution from

those first Iranian-made Shahed drones to what we have now, these jet-powered drones that are being directed by AI. You see technological advances like this every time there's a major war. Drones obviously are the big leap now. We saw in the war in Iran, how the big role that drones are playing there across the Middle East now as well. It's the AI factor that, you know, we've never quite had that when we're talking about, you know, the invention of the catapult or the invention of the tank, those were always being controlled by humans and they would absolutely change the way war was fought. But here's one where we don't actually, the first time where someone's questioning, I think the broader consequences for this are much bigger than whoever

came up with the Trebusier. You actually were in Latvia recently for NATO war games. What did you see when it comes to drones and how they're being used? Yeah, this was really interesting. I spent a day, in eastern Latvia, not far from where the drone struck with a, it was a joint exercise called Crystal Arrow, and it's held every year, joint exercise between the Latvian army and the Canadian-led multinational battalion, it's a NATO battalion made up of several countries, but led by Canadian commander and predominantly Canadian troops on the ground. And the reason why I was interested in checking out this exercise, which happens every year, like I said, was it was the first time

they were going to be trying to integrate drones on a wide scale. And, you know, I think NATO was bringing journalists there and they're proudly showing, you know, how much, how much they'd learn from the war in Ukraine. And there were actually Ukrainians there doing the training, you know, showing how they would operate the drones, et cetera, et cetera. But compared to the conflict in Ukraine itself, I thought it was all very, you know, 2022 for a one for a better term, like the start of the war in Ukraine where you'd have a single drone sort of monitoring as a vehicle moved down a road and then calling an artillery strike. That's the way the war was fought at the start of the war in Ukraine. These days, there would be hundreds of drones in the air, anything like a battlefield

situation. And, you know, there's a line that, you know, generals are always preparing for the last war. In this case, that's not quite fair. I feel like generals were preparing for the start of the, of what they're seeing rather than they're unable to keep up. You know, I keep hearing and I'm reading from your reporting about how this is really, like drones are really at the forefront of these wars. But when you say something like there are hundreds of drones instead of like one or two, it's just really hard for me to even like picture that. It just seems so strange. Yeah, I mean, an average night in Ukraine, and this is, you know, not even talking about the frontline situation, but if you're in, you know, in Kiev for the night, and Kiev is the target of that night's Russian aerial attack,

there can be, I think, the other night with 1,500 drones launched over 36 hours. And those are sort of the bigger drones that are meant to hit power plants and attack cities along the front line. I mean, it is now impossible to get to, At the start of the war, to try and put this in some context, we used to be able to visit troops right at the front line and we would return to a hotel that we'd use as a base that we'd make sure that we were sort of more than 25, 50 kilometers from the front line because that was the maximum range of Russian artillery. Nowadays, we wouldn't stay anywhere near that close because the number of drones in the sky. And I recently talked to the commander of a Ukrainian unit. We were talking about the Battle of Pokrovsk, which is now under Russian occupation. And he was talking about how it would take him two days to get from his headquarters in the city of Pukrovsk to the front lines, which were, you know, I think 15 kilometers away or something because they had to walk there because any concentration, any vehicles would be hit by a drone.

Any movement during the day would be hit by a drone so they'd wait for nightfall and sort of walk, you know, in the trees and small groups of people because it's just, and this has happening in both sides of the conflict. And so you have this, they call it the kill zone in Ukraine, this expanded area. around what is the front line that no one dares to go to because of drones and they bring supplies, ammunition and food gets dropped into the trenches by other drones that are evading drones as they try and drop off

the trenches. There are still humans in those trenches because you need them to hold that front line but the rest of the battleground is drones. Wow, that is just unimaginable. Yeah, walking instead of using a vehicle because this is a way to avoid the drones. Wow. Yeah, and we recently saw the first incident of the Ukrainian say

where they took a Russian position using only drones. They used aerial drones, but also land drones, which are often just like a little ATV with a remote control as a machine gun or something on this little vehicle, a little platform. And they say that, you know, you had Russian soldiers surrendering to robots, you know, talking to the camera of a drone and saying, I surrender.

And the operator would say, okay, well, then put down your gun. You're like, it's a whole different type of war than anything we've seen before, one that's changing really fast, but one that also, as we've been discussing, We can't see what this means for, well, for humans. Based on what you've laid out today, Mark, and this concern with drones, especially action happening in the Baltics, what kind of possibility is there of a new front opening up in this war and NATO having to get more actively involved? I mean, there's always that danger. Since the start, there have been this danger of the war for Ukraine sort of escalating to a regional war that involves NATO against Russia. And I think there's sort of two very different takes on that.

And the first one, which maybe, it's certainly the take I heard from sort of NATO officers in Latvia, is that, well, 80% of the Russian military force, if not more, is currently deployed in Ukraine. They're barely making any progress there. They can't wage war against anyone else, let alone get into a combat with NATO, the world's strongest military alliance. the other side of that is taking the same facts and saying, well, Putin isn't getting what he wants out of this conflict. And what he's telling is people domestically is the reason why Russia hasn't conquered Ukraine is struggling to even control the rest of the Donbas region is that they're basically fighting NATO. That NATO is standing behind Ukraine. NATO is the big enemy. And that, you know, Russia against Ukraine, we would have beaten them by now.

We're fighting all 30 members of the alliance or 32 members. So in that case, if that's the narrative in Putin's head and the people around, him or advising him, maybe they feel the need to tackle the larger enemy to force a peace deal that they're more, you know, to get to that end of the war that they're seeking, which would be some sort of division of Eastern Europe as per the end of the Cold War. And especially in this moment where Donald Trump is bringing home American soldiers from Europe, withdrawing 5,000 from Germany this week, canceling a deployment to Poland. You start to get towards this if they believe this conflict is inevitable, they being the Kremlin, now might be the time.

So, Mark, what kind of developments will you be watching for? I mean, I think the future of the war in Ukraine to a large extent is connected to what happens with the war in Iran. You know, we've seen in the last few days both the United States and now Britain lifting their sanctions on Russian oil. The oil price is still much, much higher than it was a few months ago, and Russia is able to sell much, much more of it. So that's billions of dollars they weren't expecting at a time when people, you know, the Ukrainian tactic, I think, has been to sort of force the Russian war. machine to run out of money to create an economic crisis inside Russia. That's getting further away as Russia is able to sort of, you know, they're getting an unexpected windfall, basically, out of this war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran. And then the second part

of that math, which is even more concerning for Ukraine, is that there's now a global run on these sort of anti-aircraft missile called the Patriot Systems that the United States, only the United States produces. Ukraine was already sort of having to beg for more of these. They're the most effective at not dealing with these drones per se, but dealing with ballistic missiles that Russia often launches after the drones. And one startling fact was that President Zelensky said that in the first day of the war in Iran, the United States and its allies had used 800 of these missiles to defend against Iranian missiles and drones, whereas Ukraine had used 600 over the course of four years. So the way that those are being used in the Middle East has created a global shortage.

Ukraine does not have the money to be first in line to buy more of them. Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar will all be ahead. And that's going to create this gap where drones aside, the most terrifying thing, if you're living in Kiev right now, is not the drones. It's what comes after them, the cruise missiles, the ballistic missiles. So that points towards very hard months ahead for the Ukrainian people. That said, I mean, there's been no sign so far that their willingness to keep fighting for their independence is bending at all. So some bad indicators.

I think the overall messages I don't expect this to end anytime soon. Mark, thank you so much. Thank you, Cheryl. That was Mark McKinnon, the Globe's Senior International correspondent based in London. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our associate producer and intern is Cynthia Jimenez. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Mahal Stein.

Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.