TALLINN, June 9 (Reuters) – Ukraine has signed a drone deal with Latvia, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday as he met with Latvian \u200cPrime Minister Andris Kulbergs on the sidelines of a summit between Ukraine \u200cand Nordic and Baltic states in the Estonian capital Tallinn.<\/p>\n
“These are concrete things to strengthen our joint \u200bdefense and co-production, and, importantly, this also means Ukraine’s expertise and experience helping to strengthen our partners,” Zelenskiy said in a post on X.<\/p>\n
He gave no details of what the deal entailed.<\/p>\n
Kulbergs said the agreement would give Latvia technological know-how and co-production opportunities.<\/p>\n
“We \u200cneed to protect our skies, \u2060and nobody knows how to do that better than Ukraine,” he told a joint press conference with Zelenskiy and other leaders \u2060attending the summit, adding that drones were responsible for the vast majority of deaths of Russian troops in the Ukraine war.<\/p>\n
Since the outbreak of the Iran war in late \u200bFebruary, Zelenskiy \u200bhas managed to leverage Ukraine’s expertise in \u200bdrone warfare into a series of \u200csuccessful diplomatic deals during visits to the Middle East and Europe.<\/p>\n
Rustem Umerov, the chairman of Ukraine’s defence and security council, said Latvia was the sixth country to join Kyiv’s drone cooperation initiative.<\/p>\n
Last month, Zelenskiy said nearly 20 countries were interested in drone deals with Ukraine.<\/p>\n
“Ukraine is interested in ensuring that every region of Europe has sufficient \u200cprotection against Russian threats,” Zelenskiy said on X.<\/p>\n
The \u200bBaltic countries, which are all members of NATO, \u200bhave seen several instances of \u200bdrones entering their airspace in recent weeks, as Ukraine has stepped \u200cup its long-range attacks on Russian \u200benergy facilities. Ukraine has \u200bblamed the incidents on Russia affecting the drone paths with electronic warfare.<\/p>\n
Responding to a question on such incidents during an earlier joint press conference with \u200bhis Estonian counterpart Alar Karis, \u200cZelenskiy repeated that Ukraine was sending its experts to help protect \u200bthe skies of its close partners.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Andrius Sytas in Tallinn and \u200bAnna Pruchnicka in GdanskEditing by Gareth Jones)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TALLINN, June 9 (Reuters) – Ukraine has signed a drone deal with Latvia, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[89],"tags":[52989,167,34416,52988,166,241,47949],"class_list":["post-103837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallinn","tag-drone-warfare","tag-estonia","tag-joint-press-conference","tag-minister-andris-kulbergs","tag-tallinn","tag-ukraine","tag-volodymyr-zelenskiy"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116721180192593285","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}