Moscow’s defense ministry reported shooting down 389 Ukrainian drones flying over Russia on Wednesday, including at the Ust-Luga port in the Leningrad region, home to one of the country’s major gas plants.
This is not the first stray drone to venture into Baltic airspace.
A second unmanned aerial vehicle from Russian airspace crashed in Latvia overnight, the country’s defense ministry wrote in a post on X, adding that no one was injured. Latvian Prime Minister Evika Siliņa said an initial investigation suggests the drone was Ukrainian and added she would raise the issue at the Joint Expeditionary Force summit, a multilateral defence cooperation framework led by the U.K. held in Helsinki on Thursday.
And earlier this week, Lithuania reported another drone had crashed in its territory after Ukraine claimed responsibility for a successful attack on Russia’s oil hub in Primorsk, a port on the Baltic Sea coast.
Kyiv corroborated the strikes, but it did not confirm the stray drones were Ukrainian.
The country’s Army General Staff issued a statement substantiating the attacks in the Leningrad region on Wednesday, saying it hit a Russian combat ice breaker in the Vyborg shipyard, while Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert Browdi claimed responsibility for the attack on Ust Luga the same night. “Together with the Defense Forces of Ukraine, the Birds of the 1st and 413th divisions paid this courtesy visit to the swamps of Russia,” Browdi said.