Russian Warship Fires Flares at Danish Helicopter — SkimNews
Get the Geopolitics newsletter
Daily geopolitics — wars, elections, sanctions, the diplomatic moves that move markets. Free.
- Denmark accused a Russian warship of firing two emergency flares at one of its Fennec helicopters during a routine photographic monitoring operation off Gedser in the Baltic Sea on Monday, with one flare passing close to the aircraft.
- The Danish government summoned the Russian ambassador, with PM Mette Frederiksen branding the action 'reckless' and designed to 'intimidate and divide,' while Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen accused Russia of 'gradually shifting the boundary for what they consider acceptable behaviour.'
- Moscow has not commented on the flare incident.
- NATO fighter pilots shot down a drone that entered Lithuanian airspace near Kaunas shortly after midnight on Tuesday, with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda linking it to intensified Russian aggression against Ukraine.
- Poland announced preventive 'aviation operations' in its airspace Monday night tied to Russian jet-powered drones conducting strikes on Ukrainian territory.
- NATO jets have been scrambled multiple times this year to shoot down stray Ukrainian drones entering Estonia and Latvia, which Kyiv blames on Russian electronic warfare disrupting drone flight paths.
Why it matters: Three separate NATO airspace confrontations in roughly 24 hours — the Danish flare incident, the Lithuania drone shootdown, and Polish scrambles over Russian strikes on Ukraine — suggest coordinated pressure across the alliance's entire eastern flank rather than isolated incidents, and Denmark's formal summoning of the Russian ambassador formalizes the diplomatic escalation.
Ask SkimNews
