Rising drone incursions put NATO’s response into question • FRANCE 24 English

Rising drone incursions put NATO’s response into question • FRANCE 24 English

Now bring in our international affairs editor Ketavan Gjasani. Ketavan good to see you. Uh we’ve had a number of incidents in the past say two weeks uh here in Europe. It seems that both Europe and NATO are finally taking the drone threat seriously. Yes. And it took uh quite a bit for them to uh actually take that threat seriously. We’re talking about now four uh NATO members that had their airspace violated by a drone, suspected uh Russian drones, Poland, Romania, Estonia, and Denmark. Uh so you’re really seeing uh the Europeans especially uh sort of grapple with the reality that they have in front of them uh now and they’re uh now grappling with the seriousness and with how do we respond to uh those uh incursions uh by drones. Uh now you’re seeing a lot of countries you heard what the French president uh said uh the uh Ursula under Lion as well as leaders from a lot of the Baltic states or the eastern flank states are now talking outright about putting the shooting down of those air different aircraft uh on the table. I think the US president floated as well and he said that yes, he would be okay with a NATO member shooting down a Russian fighter jet in that case if it violated the airspace. So you’re seeing a sort of escalation of that. Uh but the question of the drones is very specific because uh if you take the example of what happened with the Polish airspace, you had around 20 drones that went into Polish airspace. What happened there? They scrambled NATO fighter jets and they took down three or four drones. All the other ones got away. And when you think about it, scrambling multi-million dollar fighter jets to go and shoot down a couple of very cheap Russian drones, for example, is not a very coste effective way to defend uh your airspace. And it’s also not a very good ratio. three or four drones downed out of 20. That’s not exactly great. So, yes, the NATO eastern flank does have the defense capabilities. They have the fighter jets. They have the missiles, but that’s not what you need when you’re fighting with these small drones. And that was exactly part of the warning uh and the plea of uh the Ukrainian president Vladimir Zalinski yesterday at the podium at the UN General Assembly when he was talking about the fact that the drones are the new arms race and he said look we know uh how to deal with them. We’ve been producing them and you should take example on us because we have it tried and tested in an actual war and we are doing pretty well when it comes to that. So what is the plan going forward? Well, look, uh, now that they’ve actually taken this, uh, seriously, there is increasing talk about the so-called drone wall. Uh, this was something that Ursula underline mentioned in her State of the Union address earlier uh this month, and there are increasing calls for that to actually uh take a hold. Uh this is something that the Baltic states asked for funding for before the summer and it was rejected uh by uh the European institutions and now they’re pushing at it again and it seems that they’ve gotten an open ear uh from the institutions. There’s going to be a meeting of the seven eastern flank states. That’s Finland, the three Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, maybe now Denmark is going to be joining so that they can figure out how to best put this drone wall into action and in becoming a reality because this is something that they know they’re going to have to deal with and not in 3 years times, 5 years time. They need to do it right now in the next few months uh if not more. We’ll see if this escalation uh continues in the days and weeks to come.

Several Danish airports, including Aalborg, were disrupted this week by unauthorized drones, forcing flight diversions and closures. Similar incursions have recently affected NATO members Romania, Poland and Estonia, prompting Europe to heighten security measures. How will NATO respond to this growing drone threat? FRANCE 24’s international affaires editor Kethevane Gorjestani has more details on this complex issue.
#NATO #drone #Denmark

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