Russian claims on Baltic drone routes totally ridiculous - NATO SecGen

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called Moscow’s claims that Ukraine uses the territory of Latvia to launch drones into Russia "totally ridiculous."

"Russian claims are totally ridiculous, and Russia knows it," he said at a press conference in Brussels on Wednesday.

Commenting on cases of Ukrainian drones entering the airspace of the alliance’s member states, Rutte noted that "if drones come from Ukraine, they are there not because Ukraine wanted to send a drone to Lithuania or Estonia." "They are there because of Russia’s reckless, illegal, full-scale attack in 2022," the NATO Secretary General said.

He also called the allies’ response to drone incursions "calm, determined, and proportionate." "As you saw yesterday, it was a Romanian F-16 fighter jet from the NATO Air Policing mission in Lithuania that shot down this drone over the airspace of Estonia. So this is exactly what we plan to prepare for," Rutte said.

In this regard, he recalled that the "Eastern Sentinel" military operation "is not only about bringing together all our capabilities on the eastern flank, but also about learning all the lessons from Ukraine and the drone war that Ukraine is successfully waging against Russia, and implementing these lessons into NATO systems, models, and approaches." "Ultimately, we must realize the fact that warfare has changed, and Ukraine demonstrates this every day," the NATO Secretary General said.