Estonia shoots down drone over NATO airspace as Ukraine war spills across the border

Põltsamaa – For a few minutes, around midday on Tuesday 19 May, the sky over central Estonia became a theatre of war. An unmanned aircraft that had entered national airspace was intercepted and shot down by a NATO fighter jet between Lake Võrtsjärv and the town of Põltsamaa. The wreckage came down at the edge of a field, in a wooded area near the village of Kablaküla, about thirty metres from the nearest inhabited house. No one was injured. But the incident - the most striking in what has become a recurring series - summed up in a matter of hours everything that makes the north-eastern flank of the Atlantic Alliance vulnerable: a drone, probably belonging to an ally, diverted by enemy electronic warfare, shot down over NATO territory, and a propaganda machine already poised to rewrite the facts. The sequence: twelve minutes of alert The sequence, reconstructed by Estonia’s Defence Minister Hanno Pevkur at a press conference, unfolded rapidly. Radar and Estonian air force systems, together …