Russia has threatened Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania with retaliation over claims they deliberately opened their airspace to Ukrainian drone strikes — claims the Baltic states deny and their own intelligence services describe as a Russian fabrication.
When Ukrainian drones began straying into Baltic territory during Kyiv’s large-scale strike campaign against Russian oil ports on the Baltic Sea, Russia moved on two tracks simultaneously. On the military track, its electronic warfare systems in the Gulf of Finland were jamming GPS navigation, causing Ukrainian drones targeting Ust-Luga and Primorsk to veer off course into Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian airspace between March 23 and 25. On the information track, the Kremlin was constructing a narrative that would reframe those accidental incursions as deliberate policy — and use that fabrication to justify threats against NATO members.
The operation can be traced to a single origin point. On March 26, the Kremlin-linked Telegram channel Mash published a claim that Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had “officially opened their airspace to Ukrainian UAVs — for attacks on St Petersburg, Leningrad region, and northwestern Russia”, adding that “previously they allowed overflights covertly, one at a time, fearing retaliation.” No evidence for either claim was presented. Within 24 hours, Russian state media had picked it up. Within days, it had reached proxy outlets across Europe in six languages. By April 6, it had become the stated basis for an official Russian Foreign Ministry threat against three NATO member states.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was first to lend official weight to the fabrication on March 31. While maintaining a conditional framing — “if this is taking place” — Peskov nonetheless treated the false claim as a legitimate policy question, telling journalists that providing airspace for what he called “hostile, terrorist activity against Russia” would “oblige us to draw appropriate conclusions and take appropriate measures”, as reported by European Pravda citing Interfax. By answering the question at all, the Kremlin had validated the Mash claim without needing to assert it directly.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova delivered the explicit threat on April 6. The statement existed in multiple versions, revealing careful word choice calibrated for maximum effect. The version published by RIA Novosti distilled it to eleven words: “They were warned. If they don’t understand, they will get a response.” The fuller version, carried by Interfax, read: ‘These countries have been given an appropriate warning. If these regimes, these countries, have enough sense, they will listen. If not, they will have to deal with a response.” The word “regimes” – applied to elected Baltic governments – was not accidental. Nor was the deliberate vagueness of “response”, which maximised deterrent ambiguity while stopping short of a specific threat that could trigger formal Article 5 deliberations within NATO.
Russian state media did not simply report the threats — it constructed an architecture to justify them.
TASS published an expert analysis on April 1, five days before Zakharova’s statement, that functioned as a trial balloon for the official narrative. Citing Alexander Mikhailov of the Military-Political Analysis Bureau, the outlet claimed: “It is unlikely that the Latvians, Lithuanians, or Estonians themselves would dare to launch air strikes against Russia from their territory — they are using Ukraine for this purpose. After all, providing airspace and launching strikes are completely different things.” The formulation was designed to humiliate while establishing legal culpability: the Baltic states were framed as cowardly co-belligerents hiding behind Ukrainian proxies.
The most significant piece of state media content in the entire operation was published by Zavtra.ru on March 26, within hours of the Mash claim. The article aggregated seven named Russian analysts into a structured casus belli argument, deploying UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 of 1974 — the Definition of Aggression — as a legal framework for strikes on NATO members. Andrei Revnivtsev of Tsargrad cited Article 3(f) of the resolution directly, arguing that a state allowing its territory to be used for aggression against a third state is itself committing an act of aggression. Alexei Pilko, director of the Eurasian Communications Center, went further: “For the defence of the Leningrad region, control over Estonian airspace is necessary. Therefore, Estonian airspace must become a no-fly zone” — a proposal for Russian military control of a NATO member’s airspace, published without editorial caveat. Pavel Danilin of Moscow’s Civic Chamber declared: “We are de facto in a state of war with NATO member states.” Alexei Chadaev, noting that the Estonian border is “five to seven minutes’ flying time” from Ust-Luga, proposed “practically thinking about how to shoot down drones over the territory of this small but proud country – a NATO member, forgive me, Lord.”
The escalation peaked on April 7 with Pravda.ru‘s military desk, which published claims from Maksim Bardin of the “Officers of Russia” group asserting that the drones were not Ukrainian at all: “These are not Ukrainian drones — they are devices backed by European countries and Britain. A convenient legend is being created in which everything is attributed to Ukraine while the real sources are concealed.” Bardin went on to claim that “with high probability, drones are not only launched from Baltic territory but also assembled there” and that Russia was “likely to destroy both the drones in the airspace and the launch and assembly points” — an explicit threat to strike infrastructure inside NATO member states, published without qualification.
Komsomolskaya Pravda added a parliamentary imprimatur on April 7, quoting State Duma Security Committee member Mikhail Sheremet: “The decision of the Baltic countries to allow Ukrainian drone overflights for attacks on Russia can be assessed as an act of aggression.” The same article cited unnamed “Estonian journalists” as having found evidence of Baltic launch sites — no link or verification was provided.
Latvia’s Defence Ministry issued a formal protest on March 31, explicitly naming what it described as “a large-scale, coordinated information operation against Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia” and demanding Russia “immediately withdraw this blatantly false information”. Estonia’s Interior Minister Igor Taro stated that claims of official permission for Ukrainian drones were “false”. Estonian intelligence chief Colonel Ants Kiviselg told ERR that Estonia had “recommended choosing attack corridors so that Ukrainian drones do not enter Estonian airspace”.
Russian state media largely ignored Latvia’s protest entirely. Where Baltic denials were mentioned, they were inverted or dismissed. Kiviselg’s statement about recommending different corridors — intended to demonstrate non-involvement — was seized upon as proof of operational coordination. Regional Russian outlet Tatar-inform described Baltic denials as “childish babbling of non-involvement”. Bloknot.ru called them “a completely inadequate response — denial of the obvious.”
The most significant finding in tracking the proxy network is the timing. Slovakia’s Hlavný Denník published its first co-belligerency article on March 25 — one day before the Mash Telegram claim that became the citation anchor for the entire Russian state media operation. The article’s analytical framing drew directly from Komsomolskaya Pravda war correspondent Alexander Kots and his Telegram channel — the same upstream source that fed Mash. This indicates the Slovak proxy outlet was drawing from the same raw material simultaneously with, or ahead of, the Kremlin-adjacent channel: a hallmark of coordinated operation rather than organic amplification.
The article’s headline asked whether it was “time to bomb Vilnius”, framing a Russian pre-emptive strike on Lithuania as a logical conclusion rather than an extreme scenario. It also performed a deliberate manipulation of a statement by Lithuanian Prime Minister Gintautė Paluckas: her confirmation that the crashed drone was Ukrainian and heading to Russia was reframed as “an official admission that Lithuania allows Ukrainian airspace use for attacks on Russia”.
A follow-up article on March 30 escalated further, informing Slovak readers that the Russian State Duma had introduced a bill allowing Russia to shoot down Ukrainian drones “in the territory of third countries” and framing potential Russian strikes on NATO members as Ukraine’s responsibility rather than Russia’s choice.
The Dutch outlet Frontnieuws published on March 30, fabricating a timeline of Baltic complicity stretching back eight months: “Since at least late August 2025, it can hardly be denied that the Baltic states are providing their airspace to Ukraine for attacks on St Petersburg.” The article dismissed Estonia’s official explanation as “a lie”, reconstructed a conspiracy theory to account for the denial, and concluded: “War law then allows “retaliation”—arguing that Article 5 would not protect a NATO member that had itself initiated aggression against Russia.
Sweden’s Friatider reframed the entire episode as a media credibility story on March 27, leading with the claim that “Swedish media misreported: drones in the Baltics were Ukrainian, not Russian” – a meta-narrative attack designed to prime Swedish readers to dismiss subsequent accurate reporting on the disinformation operation itself.
Italy’s Controinformazione embedded the co-belligerency claim in its most compressed form on March 27, describing how “Poland and Baltic states allow Ukrainians — i.e., NATO forces — to use their territory”, with the parenthetical equation of Ukraine and NATO collapsing the two into a single belligerent and making the entire alliance complicit in what Russia portrays as attacks on its territory.
Hungary’s Magyar Nemzet connected the drone incidents to domestic Hungarian politics on March 30, noting that “a stray drone or surface-to-air missile could even reach Hungary, which is why it is especially important that our country stays out of the conflict” — mirroring Orbán government messaging while implicitly validating Russian threats as legitimate deterrents.
Taken together, the coverage reveals a layered operation with distinct functions at each tier. The Mash Telegram channel seeded the foundational false claim. Zavtra.ru and the Russian expert ecosystem built the legal and strategic justification within 24 hours. TASS provided institutional credibility through named analysts. Peskov and Zakharova gave it official Kremlin endorsement. Pravda.ru’s military desk escalated to explicit targeting language. And across Europe, proxy outlets translated, amplified, and localised the narrative for domestic audiences — with at least one, Hlavný Denník, moving before the Kremlin’s own channels.
Latvia named the operation clearly. Its Defence Ministry said Russia’s goal was “to discredit NATO, undermine public trust in state institutions, and weaken support for Ukraine, including by spreading disinformation through social media bots targeting Russian-speaking audiences and younger users.” The Institute for the Study of War assessed on March 27 that Russia was attempting to “set conditions to justify future aggression” against the Baltic states.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, speaking alongside EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas in Kyiv on March 31, placed the drone incidents within that broader context. “I can state with certainty that in all these cases, these were entirely deliberate and targeted actions by Russia,” he said. “We have intelligence data indicating that the Russians are intentionally diverting drones toward the Baltic states in order to use these incidents for their informational and propaganda purposes,” the Kyiv Independent reported.
The fabricated claim that Baltic states opened their airspace was never substantiated. What was substantiated — by Latvia’s own Defence Ministry, by ISW, and by Ukrainian intelligence — was the operation designed to make people believe it.
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