A prime minister has resigned over a drone. Not a missile strike, not a military incursion in the conventional sense — unmanned aerial vehicles that crossed into Latvia from Russian airspace, crashed in the eastern Latgale region, and set off a political chain reaction that consumed a government in five days.

Evika Siliņa announced her resignation on Thursday, becoming the first European leader brought down by the drone warfare that has become a defining feature of the war in Ukraine. Her defence minister, Andris Sprūds, had been sacked days earlier. Her coalition had collapsed overnight. Latvia, a NATO frontline state spending 5% of its GDP on defence, is now scrambling to form a caretaker government five months before scheduled elections.

And the drones keep coming.

Five Days That Toppled a Government

On 7 May, three drones entered Latvian airspace from Russia. One crashed near the town of Rēzekne, striking a disused oil storage facility and igniting a small fire. Another crashed nearby. A third flew in and out of Latvian territory. Nobody was killed. Nobody was injured.

But the political damage was immediate and severe. Residents complained that emergency cell-broadcast alerts arrived nearly an hour after the first crash, according to the BBC. Latvia’s armed forces had not detected the incoming drones at all. The public, already jittery after a previous drone incident on 25 March, wanted answers.

Siliņa blamed Sprūds, saying the incident “clearly demonstrates that the political leadership of the defence sector has failed to fulfil its promise of safe skies over our country,” according to The Guardian. She fired him on Sunday.

Sprūds’s Progressive party saw it differently. Nine of its legislators quit the coalition, accusing Siliņa of making the defence minister a scapegoat. That left her government with 41 seats in the 100-seat Saeima, facing certain defeat in a confidence vote. By Thursday, Siliņa stood before television cameras.

“I am resigning, but I am not giving up,” she said.

Sprūds, for his part, told Euronews that dealing with drones that have “lost their trajectory” is inherently difficult. He argued there was no “silver bullet” for stopping rogue drones, while accepting “political responsibility” for the failures.

He is not wrong about the technical challenge. But a country on NATO’s eastern edge, spending more on defence proportionally than almost any ally, expected better than an hour-long gap in warning its own citizens.

A Pattern Across the Alliance

Latvia is not alone. Since March, multiple drones — believed to be Ukrainian military UAVs targeting Russian infrastructure — have strayed into Lithuanian, Estonian, and Latvian airspace. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said the incursions were “the result of Russian electronic warfare deliberately diverting Ukrainian drones from their targets in Russia.”

In other words, Moscow is jamming Ukrainian drones, and some of them drift westward into NATO territory.

On Friday morning, the same day Siliņa’s resignation dominated European headlines, Helsinki Airport suspended all flights for three hours after Finnish authorities issued a drone danger alert for the southern Uusimaa region. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo confirmed on social media that the “danger in Uusimaa is over,” but the disruption rippled through the day’s flight schedule, according to Euronews.

Further south, the pressure is even more direct. Hungary’s new prime minister, Péter Magyar, summoned Moscow’s ambassador on Thursday — a stark departure from his predecessor Viktor Orbán’s Kremlin-friendly posture — after a Russian drone attack on Ukraine killed at least six people and prompted Poland to scramble fighter jets. Slovakia closed its border with Ukraine. Moldova reported a Russian drone flew approximately 180 miles through its airspace, according to The Guardian.

The picture is one of an alliance under relentless, if indirect, pressure from a conflict that shows no sign of ending.

The Air Defence Gap

European leaders have been talking about the drone threat for months. In September 2025, after drone incursions into NATO airspace reached what officials described as unprecedented levels, they agreed to develop a “drone wall” along the alliance’s borders. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte announced the Eastern Sentry programme following a violation of Polish airspace. A new US anti-drone system was deployed to the eastern flank in November, according to Euronews.

Talk, however, has outpaced capability. The “drone wall” is a concept, not yet a functioning system. Eastern Sentry is operational but limited in scope. And as Latvia’s experience demonstrates, even a country highly motivated to defend its skies can find itself flat-footed when a small, fast-moving UAV crosses the border undetected.

Sprūds acknowledged as much. “There are questions about what we can do now and how we can do it,” he told Euronews. “At the same time, we are moving forward with our air defences.”

Latvia is finalising a €3.49 billion defence loan from the EU under the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) scheme, much of it earmarked for air defence improvements, according to the Latvian Defence Ministry. President Edgars Rinkēvičs said a “long-term” air defence accord with Ukraine is being prepared, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy has offered to send Ukrainian experts to assist Riga — specialists who have more practical experience with drone warfare than any military in Europe.

But defence acquisitions take years. Political crises take days.

What Comes Next

Rinkēvičs will meet all parliamentary parties on Friday to begin forming a replacement government. The most likely outcome is a caretaker administration that limps toward the October elections, when voters will render their own verdict on the drone debacle.

The implications extend well beyond Riga. Jānis Sārts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, warned that Latvia has become “more vulnerable” to external threats amid the political turmoil. Sprūds himself cautioned that hostile actors — he meant Russia — could seek to exploit the instability ahead of the elections. “There is manipulation by the aggressor country — by the neighbouring country — whose intentions we know and are aware of,” he said.

For NATO, the episode raises uncomfortable questions. An alliance that can deploy tens of thousands of troops to its eastern flank has not yet solved the problem of single drones wandering across its borders undetected. The war in Ukraine has made drone warfare ubiquitous; European air defences have not kept pace.

Siliņa, in her resignation statement, was right about one thing: “The brutal war waged by Russia in Ukraine has changed the security situation throughout Europe.” What she could not solve — what no single Baltic government has yet solved — is how to protect the skies above that changed environment.

Latvia’s government paid the political price for that unfinished work. Others may yet follow.

Sources