Latvia

Riga lost a defense minister and then a government to drones nobody claimed, which is Russia's sub-threshold pressure working exactly as designed.

Latvia is converting total dependence into partial ownership, building interceptor drones on Ukrainian technology and sharing the production line with Estonia instead of waiting on allied jets.

The four-jets-for-one-drone exchange over Latvia repeats the Red Sea lesson of 2024: the side sending the cheap weapon profits from every engagement.

Drone incursions redirected by Russian electronic warfare kept crossing Baltic airspace, and the political bill came due in Riga: the defense minister resigned and the coalition government fell. NATO downed a drone over Latvian territory in August, and Riga accelerated an interceptor program it owns while completing the fortified line sealing the Belarus frontier.