A French Rafale downs a drone over Latvia, NATO's second Baltic shootdown in three weeks

Ukrainian long-range drones knocked off course by Russian jamming keep crossing into NATO airspace, and the Baltics want more than fighter patrols to stop them.

A French Air and Space Force Rafale shot down a drone over eastern Latvia on the morning of June 8, the Latvian army said, Reuters reported. The jet flies NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission out of Šiauliai Air Base in Lithuania. Riga warned residents of the Ludza and Rēzekne municipalities to shelter around 9:20 a.m. The all-clear came near 10:30, after the drone fell at Rogovka. A second alert went up hours later.

The army would not say who launched it. The drone crossed into Latvian airspace "as a result of Russian electromagnetic warfare," it said, leaving the operator unnamed. Drones drifting in from the east are generally assessed as Ukrainian long-range strike aircraft knocked off course by Russian jamming, not deliberate strikes on the alliance, AeroTime wrote. Kyiv blames Russia for bending the flight paths. Ukraine has lately pushed deep strikes against Russian oil and naval targets, some routed across the Baltic Sea.

It was the second confirmed shootdown over Baltic territory in three weeks. A Romanian F-16 on the same mission downed a probable Ukrainian drone over Estonia on May 19, the first allied missile fired in defense of the alliance in the Baltics. A separate drone blew up in a Moldovan field early Monday; Chișinău held Russia responsible. The diplomatic damage runs deeper: a Ukrainian drone that hit an oil depot in Rēzekne on May 7 cost Latvia its previous defense minister and tipped Riga into a coalition crisis.

Raivis Melnis, who took the defense ministry after that crisis, brushed off the cost of the scramble. "We shouldn't count the money about how much each shot costs when we're talking about our security," he said. The Baltic presidents asked NATO in May to move past air policing toward ground-based air defense and counter-drone systems. Each scramble against a stray drone strengthens that case, and Latvia is still hunting the wreckage to identify what it downed.