Kiev’s stray drones are rattling Baltic and Nordic allies, but they prefer to blame the usual suspect
Unelected European Commission President ‘Queen’ Ursula von der Leyen was in Lithuania a few days ago to come up with a plan to tackle Ukrainian drones that risk regime changing European allies. The strategy? Blame Russia – the political equivalent of a universal remote to change the channel from one’s own incompetence. Not only does Russia get to be held responsible for its own stray drones, but also for Kiev’s.
So why Lithuania? Well, its president, Gitanas Nauseda, has been making proclamationsabout how his country won’t be used for military ops or have its sovereignty violated by drones or anything else. Okay, but what if it’s just the doing of a Ukrainian with shaky stick control – like a teenager with one hand on the gamepad and the other buried in a bag of Doritos? Except that it’s setting off national emergencies. That’s cool, right?
Meanwhile, over in Estonia, the defense ministry has already been going on about how they expect Ukraine to get its droning skills up to par so that these things don’t keep wandering into Estonian airspace. But Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur is being super philosophical about all these incursions into his country’s own airspace… and Latvia’s… and Lithuania’s, while sounding like he’s dealing with a kid who’s learning not to scribble on the walls. With regards to the Ukrainians, he said he just needs to figure out “what exactly it means and what they themselves had in mind by it.”
Right, because maybe this is just their way of expressing themselves. A few days ago, Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Andrey Sibiga admitted that this was happening in a social media post, which blamed Russia for knocking the drones off course.
I’m sure the Latvian prime minister will be psyched to hear that… Oops, I mean the FORMER Latvian PM who felt compelled to resign while detonating his defense minister’s career on the way out after Ukrainian drones started hitting his country. “The measure of public and my trust in Defense Minister Andris Sprüds has been exhausted. The Latgale drone incident was the last straw,”said now former Latvian PM Evika Silina.
Or rather, one might argue that it was Ukraine that took out the Latvian defense chief. Meanwhile, he sounded like he was trying to run interference for Kiev: “In recent days and weeks, we have experienced drone incidents in Latvia and other countries. Uncontrolled drones must not endanger the safety of our people… And right now, my political responsibility is to prevent our armed forces from being used in a political campaign,” Sprüds said, neglecting to pin the blame on the country whose drones were ultimately responsible for drop-kicking him from power.
Looks like an attempt by Ukraine to bring full regime change to its good Baltic pal, Latvia.
Next up: Finland? In mid-May, Helsinki airport briefly closed due to a drone before reopening. Residents were instructed to stay home. Then the Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, comes out and says that it’s alright to crawl back out from under the beds. Turns out it was just some fake news… spread en masse by Finland. The drone wasn’t delivering Putin. Not yet, at least. But maybe soon. Before 2030 for sure, in any case – as they keep saying.
As you might imagine, people really loved the Finnish authorities for interrupting their day to conduct a test run for when Putin decides to crash land via drone and ruin everyone’s afternoon sauna. Turns out that it’s actually Ukrainian drones that have been veering into Finland since at least March, according to multiple reports.
But now Queen Ursula is saying that it’s Russia that’s messing with Ukrainian drones and sending them into Baltic and Finnish airspace. If that was really the case – that Russia could predict the exact trajectory of multiple Ukrainian drones to the point of being able to simultaneously calculate the precise deflection vectors needed to push them all off course in real time with no advance warning – then why wouldn’t Russia be doing that with the Ukrainian drones that are striking Russian assets? That’s the question asked by French electronic warfare expert Olivier Dujardin, who adds that the odds of this capability actually existing is basically zero. Nonetheless, Queen Ursula and the leaders of the Baltic states appear to believe Moscow is using this alleged technology strictly to mess with them, rather than to help itself.
Surely there can’t be any other explanation. Couldn’t have anything to do with Ukraine being clumsy at the controls, as European officials have already pointed out, or using EU territory to escape detection by Russian air defense, as Dujardin suggests.
Ursula’s big on combating disinformation except when it comes to scratching past the surface of an inconvenient narrative that might actually force the EU to take a step closer to peace or dispel the stories they keep telling themselves.
So, basically, they’ve chalked it up to believing this fairy tale about Russia making Ukrainians suck at navigating drones, forcing them to constantly veer into Baltic airspace en masse. And now – what do you know – here’s the foreign minister of one of those same Baltic countries, Lithuania, who apparently feels so empowered by this EU fake news that he’s rattling sabers over the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
“We have to show the Russians that we’re capable of penetrating the small fortress they’ve built in Kaliningrad. NATO has the capability, if necessary, to raze Russian air defences and missile bases there to the ground,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys said recently.
Really sounds like he’s game for peace there. The EU has this guy all riled up and psyched about war… like a puppy gets with walkies. They keep talking about fighting Russia, and he wants them to open the front door already and let the dogs of war off the leash.
Ursula now claims the EU has wanted peace from day one, but at the same time seems keen to leverage any ridiculous pretext to avoid it – even when a more rigorous examination of the facts would best serve the interests of any détente – something they seem intent on avoiding.
Looks like the EU is about as adept at navigating the road to peace as Ukraine is at directing drones.
