Latvia in government crisis: how two drones brought down the Siliņa cabinet

Riga - It took just four days for Latvia to move from a security incident on its eastern border to a full-blown government crisis. On Thursday 14 May 2026, Prime Minister Evika Siliņa announced her resignation and that of the entire Council of Ministers, bringing an end to a three-party coalition which had already effectively fallen apart the day before. For a country bordering both Russia and Belarus, the timing could hardly have been more delicate. The trigger came from the sky In the preceding days, several Ukrainian drones - apparently diverted by Russian electronic warfare while heading towards targets on Russian territory - entered Latvian airspace. Two of them crashed into an oil depot in Rēzekne, in the eastern region of Latgale, damaging an empty tank. What mattered was not the material damage, which was almost symbolic, but the failure to respond: there was no attempt to shoot down the aircraft, and the air-raid sirens sounded only after the impact. According to a NATO centre …