NATO Jets Down a Drone Over Latvia in the Baltic Mission's Second Shootdown of 2026

An Italian Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon shot down an unidentified drone over the Balvi municipality of eastern Latvia shortly after 04:00 on 14 August 2026, NATO said. Two Eurofighters had scrambled from Šiauliai in Lithuania and two Turkish F-16s from Ämari in Estonia; the alliance said one of the Italian jets "neutralised the potential threat over an unpopulated area" after positive identification.

Latvian authorities issued alerts for five municipalities — Augšdaugava, Preiļi, Rēzekne, Balvi and Alūksne — as the target crossed the border region. The defence ministry said the aircraft had entered Latvian airspace as a result of Russian electromagnetic warfare spilling out of the war in Ukraine, but officials did not establish whose drone it was, and the type has not been disclosed. "As long as Russia's aggression in Ukraine continues, a recurrence of cases where foreign drones enter or approach Latvian airspace is possible," the military said.

That caveat matters. The first NATO shootdown over Latvia, on 8 June, was carried out by a French Rafale under the same mission and against the same backdrop of Russian jamming — and the machine was subsequently identified as a Ukrainian Maya decoy drone. Of the 97 incursions on record across Europe since 2022, 56 are attributed to Russia, 12 to Ukraine — long-range aircraft pushed off course while attacking Russian Baltic ports — nine to Belarus, and 20 have never been attributed by any authority at all.

GlobalMilitary.net's European airspace violations tracker has now logged 44 established incursions in 2026, against 31 for the whole of 2025 and nine in 2024. The count records only violations actually established — tracked on radar, intercepted, filmed or recovered as debris — and excludes the unexplained airport drone sightings that dominated headlines in 2025, a large share of which collapsed under investigation. The 14 August shootdown is the first Baltic entry since the June interception.

The eastern flank has been busy in both directions. NATO's North Atlantic Council met on 12 August over recent violations of Polish and Romanian airspace and said Russia "bears full responsibility" for them. Hours later, Romanian radar tracked five targets near Ismail and one of them crossed into national airspace south of Pardina, flying along the Chilia branch of the Danube for about ten minutes before turning back toward Ukraine while two F-16s monitored it.

Baltic Air Policing has run continuously since 2004 and is manned on four-month rotations by allied detachments — currently Italy at Šiauliai and Turkey at Ämari. Two live drone engagements in ten weeks mark a shift for a mission historically limited to identifying and escorting Russian military aircraft along the Baltic coast.