NATO Begins To Resist Russian Aggression

A drone flying over Lithuania is changing everything in this war

A Russian drone, shot down by NATO fighter jets over Lithuania, may seem like just another episode in a major war. Especially since, according to the preliminary account by Lithuanian authorities, the drone had no intention of attacking Lithuania at all. It was flying toward Ukraine and veered off course. But it is precisely such “coincidences” that best demonstrate how the very geography and nature of war are changing.

Putin started this war convinced that it would remain exclusively a Ukrainian problem. Russia would bomb Ukrainian cities, destroy Ukrainian infrastructure, and seize Ukrainian territory, while NATO countries would watch from the sidelines and argue among themselves about how many weapons to send to Kyiv so as not to provoke Moscow.

But war knows no political boundaries—the ones devised for it in boardrooms.

This isn’t the first time a Russian drone has entered the airspace of a NATO country. But this is the first time it has been shot down not by Ukrainian air defenses, but by an Italian fighter jet on a North Atlantic Treaty Organization mission. This is not yet a clash between Russia and NATO. But it is already a situation in which the consequences of Russia’s war are being directly addressed by NATO’s armed forces.

And this raises a simple question: How many more such incidents must occur before Europeans finally grasp the obvious?

One can talk as much as one likes about the need to avoid escalation. One can convince oneself that the war is taking place somewhere between Kharkiv and the Donbas and that the main thing is to prevent it from approaching the borders of the European Union. But Russian missiles and drones are under no obligation to respect this psychological boundary. They could go out of control, veer off course, and end up over the territory of a neighboring country. And at some point, a situation may arise where it will no longer be possible to say with certainty whether the latest violation was an accident or a test of NATO’s readiness to defend its own airspace.

That is precisely why the significance of the Lithuanian incident lies not in a single downed drone.

The significance lies in the fact that NATO did exactly what the citizens of its member states should expect it to do: it identified a threat and eliminated it. Without endless and pointless debates about whether Russia would be provoked by the very fact of resistance.

For many years, Putin has based his policy on the West’s fear of a direct confrontation with Russia. And that fear did indeed exist and continues to exist. But the longer the war lasts, the more opportunities for such a confrontation Russia itself creates.

It wasn’t Lithuania that sent a drone to the Russian border. A Russian drone ended up over Lithuania.

It wasn’t NATO that started the war in Europe. Russia started the war against Ukraine.

And with each new day of the war, the gap between Russian aggression against Ukraine and the need for NATO countries to defend their own territory is narrowing.

Vitaly Portnikov, Facebook

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