Latvia is bolstering its anti-drone capabilities along borders shared with Russia and Moscow-allied Belarus after unmanned aircraft have crossed into the NATO member nation, according to a military official.
Recent weeks have seen Ukrainian drones drift into Baltic NATO countries’ airspace, creating confusion and heightening tensions with Russia during a period when U.S. dedication to NATO’s mutual defense principles faces scrutiny.
Ukraine, which has been striking Russia’s Baltic oil loading facilities, has attributed the wayward drones to Russian interference with their aircraft’s navigation signals, causing them to deviate from intended flight paths.
On May 7, two such unmanned vehicles detonated at an unoccupied oil storage site in Latvia. Another crashed into a lake on Saturday after entering the country undetected, with a fisherman observing the incident.
An incoming drone prompted Lithuanian legislators in the capital Vilnius to seek underground protection on May 20, while a NATO fighter aircraft destroyed another unmanned vehicle over Estonia on May 19.
“We plan to deploy (drone) interceptor teams over the next two weeks”, Modris Kairiss, head of the Latvian Army Autonomous Systems Competence Centre, told Reuters at a side event of the Drone Summit conference in Latvia.
These units will include up to four soldiers operating from rugged terrain vehicles with killer drones capable of eliminating incoming military aircraft within a 10-km (6-mile) range, he explained.
The quantity of such units patrolling Latvia’s 400-km border with Russia and its ally Belarus remains classified information.
“We do need to increase the number of such teams, but we need to balance this against other army needs. If we put them on every kilometer of the border, we will quickly burn all army resources”, he said.
Speaking at a military testing facility where Latvia is evaluating cutting-edge drone technologies through a NATO program, Kairiss explained that neutralizing military drones during peacetime presents complications, as radar information in NATO nations is classified and distributing it to soldiers responsible for drone destruction proves cumbersome.
“It’s not enough to engage with anything you notice. We need to identify it first”, to avoid hitting a civilian airplane, Kairiss said.
An additional emerging challenge for Latvia’s military, and NATO overall, involves the increasing deployment of small drones, Kairiss noted.
“They are several steps ahead of the anti-drone systems… Detection and interception of the small targets is hard, and it’s the big challenge that soon we will all face,” he said.
