Estonia is lengthening a fence along its frontier with Russia and digging anti-tank ditches and building bunkers to prepare for a possible clash with Moscow. But those fortifications won’t protect against the danger that Estonia and its NATO partners face from Russian drones and electronic warfare.
From the Baltics to the Black Sea, nations bordering Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are confronting spillover from Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
The intrusion of roughly 20 Russian drones into Poland this month highlighted gaps in NATO’s air defenses, as multimillion-dollar jets were scrambled to respond to drones that cost thousands and ultimately crashed into the Polish countryside. Russia denied targeting Poland, but Polish officials implied it was deliberate.
Confronted with a mounting issue, some European Union defense ministers will convene Friday to discuss building a “drone wall.”
NATO warned Russia Tuesday that it would respond to any further violations of its airspace, after Estonia said that Russian fighter jets breached it last week. But while the alliance knows how to detect threats from jets and missiles, countering drones is a tougher task, officials said.
In Poland, “most of the drones were not detected,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said. “This is a real gap we have to solve.”
Military and defense officials from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — NATO and EU members that border Russia — told The Associated Press that protecting against drones means tackling a complicated mix of technological, financial and bureaucratic challenges.
Europe needs cheaper technology that can be purchased and to accelerate slow production and procurement timelines, they said. But even then, drone tech is advancing so rapidly that equipment bought now could be obsolete within months.
“What I need,” said Lt. General Andrus Merilo, who leads Estonia’s military, is technology that is “good enough, it’s affordable and can be produced in mass.”
“I don’t need high-end capabilities of which I can fire only one, against targets which will be attacking in hundreds,” he said.
Europe’s drone challenge
Russia is deploying drones every night in Ukraine, because each drone is a “lottery ticket that always wins,” said Kusti Salm, a former senior official at Estonia’s Defense Ministry.
That’s because a drone either strikes a target or, if Ukraine destroys it with a missile, it depletes Kyiv’s air defenses and coffers, since missiles cost far more than drones, said Salm, who now runs Frankenburg Technologies, a firm developing low-cost anti-drone missiles.
Although NATO countries have a “very good understanding” of how to guard against conventional threats like missiles and aircraft, they must quickly get better at countering drone threats, said Tomas Godliauskas, Lithuania’s deputy minister of national defense.
When the Russian drones entered Poland, NATO members dispatched fighter jets and attack helicopters and put missile defense systems on alert. But none of those options was specifically tailored for drone combat.
Even though Russia and Ukraine have increasingly used drones against each other, investment in counter-drone systems has lagged, Salm said. He suggested that’s partly because it’s easier to field a drone than to create something that can detect or intercept it.
Slow, low-flying drones made from wood, fiberglass, plastic or polystyrene might evade radar systems tuned to spot a fast-moving metal missile, or be mistaken for birds or civilian aircraft. Adversaries can also circumvent defenses by launching drones from inside a country, as Ukraine did with devastating effect when it struck Russian airfields this year.
There are other technical obstacles, including trying to jam enemy drones and communications without disrupting your own, Merilo said.
Multiple drone incidents
In August, a Ukrainian drone — possibly diverted by Russian electronic jamming — landed in a field in southeastern Estonia. It crashed because the military couldn’t detect it, Merilo said.
The Estonian military and border guard have also lost drones — used for surveillance and to prevent illegal crossings — to Russian jamming, which has also been blamed for disrupting flights.
Other drones have crashed in Romania, Moldova, Lithuania and Latvia, and there have been numerous unidentified drone sightings over military sites and airports in Europe, including in Germany, the U.K., Norway and Denmark, where air traffic was halted for several hours at Copenhagen Airport on Monday.
The volume of incidents shows that Europe must tackle its drone problem “right now,” said Col. Māris Tūtins, head of information analysis and operations at Latvia’s Joint Forces Headquarters.
Drone wall
Support is growing among European leaders for creating some kind of drone wall along the EU’s eastern frontier, though the 27-nation bloc in March rejected funding for a joint Estonia-Lithuania proposal to build one.
The EU needs to make funding for the project a priority, Pevkur said. But while backing for the concept is increasing, actually building a drone defense system will be difficult.
“Drones are not mosquitoes,” the Estonian defense minister said, implying they would be unlikely to be neutralized by an “electronic wall” along NATO’s borders.
There are many varieties of drones, including those for intelligence and reconnaissance, those that fly at high altitude, those used in strikes or ones that remain tethered to a thin fiber-optic cable while airborne, making them impossible to jam. Russia also employs decoy drones in Ukraine that carry no payload and are intended to exhaust air defenses.
Any strategy to counter drones requires a layered approach, including sensors, “electronic warfare … also low-cost small missiles or attack drones,” Merilo said.
Need for cheaper and more plentiful technology
Although the need for improved drone defenses isn’t new, it’s still largely only feasible to buy systems that are “really expensive,” take years to develop and can’t be mass-produced, Merilo said.
He suggested that’s in part because major defense firms that have spent decades building billion-dollar air defense systems might not welcome a new — and cheaper — product on the market.
“We have to understand this game,” Merilo said, noting that some technology exists, but “the question is who — and how fast they can start producing.”
Under nightly barrages, Ukraine is rapidly creating its own systems, including long-range attack drones and smaller ones for frontline use.
While large defense contractors remain vital to Europe’s security, Latvia and some other NATO countries have turned to smaller firms — such as Salm’s Frankenburg — to procure small anti-drone missiles once they enter production.
But a fragmented approach isn’t ideal, Salm said. Instead, the EU should invest more in European startups, which can accelerate drone-defense production usable by allies across different weapons platforms, he said.
Europe needs to switch to “semi-wartime thinking” and foster closer cooperation between the military, government and defense industry to close its technology gap, Godliauskas said.
In Ukraine, sometimes only weeks pass between drone technology being developed and being deployed on the battlefield. Europe “doesn’t have time” to spend years waiting to purchase equipment, the Lithuanian official said.
Another lesson from Ukraine is that what works today may fail tomorrow, Godliauskas said.
While drone defense is vital now, it would be a mistake to neglect everything else, Tūtins said. That’s because Moscow is using “all means possible” to unsettle Europe, including hybrid warfare and cyberattacks, he said.
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