Recent weeks have seen a significant escalation of military tensions in and around the Baltics. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which are all NATO members, now experience regular incursions into their airspace by Ukrainian drones. According to both Kyiv and the Baltic capitals, those drones, en route to hit targets in western Russia, get diverted by Russian electronic jamming and end up entering these countries’ territories.In early May, several stray unmanned aircraft crashed in Latvia, one of them damaging an oil storage facility. Those developments triggered a political crisis in Latvia and led to the collapse of its government. Last week, a drone was shot down over Estonia, and another drone sighting forced Lithuania to suspend train and air traffic temporarily.Days later, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and Russia’s representative to the United Nations issued menacing warnings, accusing Baltic states of having greenlit air corridors for Ukrainian unmanned aircraft to attack infrastructure targets in Russia and even hosting Ukrainian drone operators.The growing tensions in the region are raising the risk of miscalculation. This is why the Baltics urgently need de-escalation mechanisms and communication channels.The dangerous new normal in Eastern EuropeThe increasing frequency of drone incidents in the region as well as Russia’s latest direct military warnings to the Baltic states indicate two highly dangerous developments.First, the long-feared horizontal escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian war …
