Estonia’s foreign minister has said stray Ukrainian drones crashing in Nato territory are a small price to pay to defeat Russia.
Nato countries have reported increasing numbers of Ukrainian drones flying into their air space, leading to travel disruptions, closed airports and the scrambling of fighter jets.
Last week an unexploded drone carrying a 5kg warhead was found in a field in Estonia and Ukraine was forced to apologise last month after Romanian fighter jets shot down a drone encroaching on Estonian airspace.
But foreign minister Margus Tsahkna has said that Estonia is looking at the bigger picture and believes the disruption is worth it.
“Of course we are not happy about [these incidents],” Tsahkna told the Financial Times. “But we are not saying to Ukraine to stop it. This is hitting the lifeline of Putin.
“We know that the tone around Putin has changed in the last two and a half months... It’s not so optimistic anymore. The main reason is economic — because of these deep strikes.”
Russia has accused the Baltic states of being involved in the strikes but Tsahkna dismissed these reports as “ridiculous” and an example of the Kremlin’s desperation.
Finland, Latvia and Lithuania have also been affected as Ukraine intensifies its long-range drone development.
The drone attacks have primarily targeted Russia’s energy infrastructure, with analysts estimating that more than a fifth of Russia’s total refining capacity may have been knocked offline.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported last week that Russian crude oil production dropped around 5 per cent year-on-year last month due to the strikes.
“This level of disruption is unprecedented in the history of the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” the IEA said in its June report.
The Ukraine-Russia war is the first to have used the aircraft on a widespread scale, with hundreds of thousands deployed across the four years since Putin ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine.
Over the weekend, he admitted that Russia is facing “unprecedented pressure” from the west and admitted that the strikes had caused shortages and problems in the country.
Fire erupted at an oil refinery in the southern Krasnodar region and in the Yaroslavl region on Sunday, as Ukraine continued the onslaught causing acute fuel shortages in parts of Russia.
“As for strikes against critical infrastructure in general, and energy infrastructure in particular, of course these attacks on our infrastructure facilities create problems, that’s obvious,” said Putin in an interview published by the Kremlin on Sunday.
