This past week there’s been a lot of discussion about Russian drones in NATO territory and what we should do about it. Do you think NATO’s response been enough so far?
Absolutely not. You know, as Estonians know, the Russians have been testing or probing airspace and conducting illegal activities at sea, all the different aspects of so-called gray zone operations. We’ve been watching what they were doing against Ukraine for the last several years.
So when Russia launched their drone operation last week, the response was to send up F-35s and other fighter jets against what turned out to be somewhere around 15 or 19 different Russian drones. That response proved that we are not ready.
Now credit to the Poles that they had the correct rules of engagement and were allowed to shoot down these drones, but the problem is, you know, the Ukrainians face 300–400 drones a day and they’ve figured out how you deal with that, and it’s not by sending up your expensive top shelf aircraft.
So that’s a long way of saying that we have been hoping and wishing that this would never come to us in NATO and it’s here. And so I will say to their credit, the Alliance quickly created this Operation Eastern Sentry, which will help raise awareness, a sense of urgency and capabilities, but we have a long, long way to go.
You talked about the rules of engagement, and I think you also said in an interview to Politico that the Baltic rules of engagement should be changed as well, the Baltic air operation here. What do you think should happen? And do you think that there is a will to actually take those steps in NATO?
Yeah, I think redesignating the NATO Baltic Sea Air Policing Mission and the Black Sea Air Policing Mission as air defense instead of air policing, that should be a very easy thing to do. And I suspect, although I don’t know, that Eastern Sentry will ultimately incorporate something like that.
What we’re talking about, of course, with air policing, you’ve got top-level aircraft from NATO countries flying out of Baltic airfields and down at MK (Mihail Kogălniceanu Airbase – ed.) Romania, and they’re there to police, to observe. But if it’s air defense, that means they would have a different mission profile, carrying weapons and the authority to shoot down anything that they see that violates or looks like it’s about to violate NATO airspace. So that should be a very easy thing for people, nations to agree on.
I also interviewed Riho Terras today, whom I think you know quite well, and he said that we have been talking about this since 2014 and yet it hasn’t happened. Should we put more pressure on NATO, or how can we ensure that now is the time when something like this should really be considered?
Well, of course, Riho is correct that these are the kind of things we’ve been talking about since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Unfortunately, it was only the Baltic countries, and to some degree Poland and Romania, that took it seriously. Everybody else west of there was like, now come on, you guys are too sensitive or you’re scaremongering.
Unfortunately, it usually takes a major failure or a major catastrophe to force large institutions and organizations to take action. So the embarrassment of these drones, so many of them, hitting inside Poland, and then the response from the American president, which was terrible, is maybe the boost that we finally need to do what needs to be done. People have to believe that the Russians clearly are willing to use force against NATO countries. And the fact that we have never responded in a meaningful way to earlier drone operations violating our airspace has only emboldened them to do more.
We have almost 10, 000 American troops that are stationed in Poland right now. And the fact that Russia launched almost 19 drones into Poland, knowing that there were 10,000 American troops there plus American Air Force, tells you that they have zero respect for the Trump administration, and they had no concern that we might somehow react in a meaningful way. So we have got to get serious and the Russians have to see that we are serious about deterrence, which means you have to be serious about defense.
Some people would say that NATO is operating in peacetime terms right now, meaning that our airspace is open, which is why we have to send aircraft to detect if it’s actually an object that means us harm and so on. Do you think that we can change some aspects of that?
I think you have said that NATO should be policing maybe in Western Ukraine as well. What can we change about this peacetime stance, where we are playing by different rules than people are in Ukraine, and that’s why they’re more successful in downing all these drones over there?
Well, keep in mind that Estonia is a sovereign country, as are Finland, Latvia, Lithuania. I mean, these are all nations that can do things. They don’t have to have NATO permission to do certain things.
So I think each nation has to act in its own best interest as well as contributing to collective security, and I’d be interested to know, does Estonia have its early warning systems? Is it connected to enough other systems that it could detect a drone that entered or was about to enter Estonian airspace? Are Estonians authorized to shoot? Is the government given the necessary authorization to shoot down a drone? Or if Russian aircraft, I think there was a Russian helicopter [that] violated Estonian airspace, if you’re authorized to shoot it down.
I think these are the kind of discussions that need to be had, and each time Russia violates something and we don’t do anything, then you see the result. And of course there are lots of other things that Estonia can do, recognizing that Estonia needs to work closely with its allies.
Now, to the broader point that you raised. If we are willing to have our pilots up flying along with the Royal Air Force and French Air Force, [if we] support the Israeli Air Force in shooting down Iranian missiles, and we also protect international shipping in the Red Sea from Houthi missiles, why are we not doing this in Ukraine? Why are we not able to fly and shoot down incoming drones and missiles that are attacking civilian targets in Western Ukraine? I’m not talking about shooting down Russian Air Force; of course the Russians, their pilots have no desire to get into Ukraine’s airspace because they know they’ll get shot down immediately. But we could do things at the level of knocking down unmanned systems. We could do that either from inside NATO airspace or inside Western Ukraine.
Which aspects do you see as problematic in drone warfare? Do you think that NATO has, as you said, enough early warning signals or technology in general that would help us to actually fight against drones. It is one thing to shoot them down, but you need to detect them first.
Of course. I think most of the recent supreme allied commanders and commanders of air command, NATO air command, have complained or expressed their concern that there are not enough indicators and warning systems. And what you really have to do, you have to tie together everything that exists. That means you have to exercise. This has been a major shortcoming. We have not had a joint multinational theater-wide air and missile defense exercise in over a decade.
We’ve done bits and pieces where you had Patriot live fire or the Navy did their thing or the Air Force did their thing, but we’ve not had one in over a decade where you tied together all the air defense systems, the early warning systems, the air forces and the headquarters that make the decisions in a large-scale rigorous exercise, especially one where the enemy force in this exercise would be attacking on the scale of what Russia does to Ukraine.
So that’s something that should happen as soon as possible and start a series of these exercises because it’s very difficult. When you think about commercial air traffic in Europe on a normal day, and then you have hundreds of drones coming in, you can’t just start shooting [at] everything that flies obviously, So there has got to be some exercises that help protect our skies. Because the Russians are clearly not going to stop with what they did last week. You have to exercise to figure out who’s talking to who, how do you connect all the systems. It’s all doable, but you have to exercise it.
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