In what has almost become a routine occurrence, military drones involved in the Russia-Ukraine war have again crashed in NATO territory. On May 7, two drones entered Latvia from Russian airspace, one of them exploding at an empty oil storage facility. Luckily, no one was injured, but the incursion is part of a troubling pattern—one that highlights the inadequate pace of European military planners’ efforts to put countermeasures in place.
Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, incidents like this one have occurred almost too often to count. Just weeks after the war began, a drone, most likely Ukrainian, flew undetected for hundreds of kilometers over Romania, Hungary and Croatia before crashing near Zagreb. Russian drones crashed in Romania in 2023, and in Poland and Lithuania in 2025. In March, a Ukrainian drone struck the chimney of a power station in Estonia. Another drone veered off-course in April, coming down in Finland.
The most egregious incident occurred on Sept. 9, 2025, when at least 19 drones entered Polish airspace from Belarus. They were later identified as Russian Gerberas, an unarmed variant of the Iranian-made Shahed 136, a one-way “kamikaze” attack drone. In response, Polish F-16s were scrambled, helped by several aerial assets from other NATO states, most notably Dutch F-35s, which together with the Polish F-16 shot down three of the drones.