On the night of May 7, a Ukrainian drone wandered into Latvian airspace from Russia, lost contact under intense electronic warfare jamming, and slammed into an empty oil tank at a fuel depot near Rēzekne, about 40 kilometres from the Russian border.

No casualties. Four damaged storage tanks. Some drone debris.

By Friday, the Latvian defence minister had been forced to resign. By Tuesday, the prime minister was gone. By next month, the country will hold snap elections. One stray drone has just toppled a NATO government.

The Drone That Wasn’t Meant to Be in Latvia

The drone in question almost certainly never intended to fly over Latvia at all. The leading theory — endorsed by Estonian and Latvian intelligence — is that it was a Ukrainian long-range strike UAV targeting Russian infrastructure, knocked off course by Russian GPS spoofing and active EW jamming, that drifted across the border and dove into the nearest large fuel-storage facility its sensors could lock onto.

That facility happened to be in Rēzekne, a town of 27,000 in the Latgale region, almost on the Russian border. The Latvian Ministry of Defence later said the drone hit four empty storage tanks; debris was recovered. Nobody was hurt. By any military metric the incident was nearly meaningless.

Politically, the incident was a guided missile.

Why Latvia Could Not Forgive This Drone

To understand why a four-empty-tank incident took down a government, you have to understand what Latvia has been saying about itself for two and a half years. Ever since 24 February 2022, Riga’s most-repeated political promise has been “we are NATO’s front line, and we will be ready.” Defence spending has nearly tripled. Air defence has been the showcase: Patriot systems, IRIS-T-SLM batteries, counter-drone radars across the eastern border.

And on the night of May 7, none of that worked. The drone crossed the border undetected — or detected, but not engaged. The first anyone in Rēzekne knew about it was the explosion.

Prime Minister Evika Siliņa was furious. On May 11 she publicly demanded the resignation of defence minister Andris Sprūds, saying he had “lost the trust of the public” and that “the drone incident clearly demonstrated that the political leadership of the defence sector has failed to fulfil its promise of safe skies over our country.” Sprūds resigned the same day.

The Coalition That Followed Sprūds Out the Door

Sprūds, however, was the chairman of the centre-left Progressives — one of the three parties holding up Siliņa’s centre-right coalition government. Within 72 hours of his ouster, the Progressives announced they would withdraw their support. The coalition’s parliamentary majority evaporated.

On May 15, Siliņa resigned. The country is now governed by a caretaker administration pending snap elections, expected in late summer.

A NATO Problem That Won’t Stay in Latvia

Latvia is the second consecutive Baltic state to absorb a stray Ukrainian drone in May. The Estonian incident — covered separately on this blog — ended with a Romanian F-16 putting a missile through the intruder. The Latvian incident ended with a smouldering oil depot and a government in pieces.

The political question that follows is uncomfortable: if a single stray drone can topple a NATO government, what happens during a coordinated Russian drone campaign against the Baltics? Every member state defence ministry from Tallinn to Bratislava is now writing variants of the same memo. And the answer they keep arriving at is the one Latvia just demonstrated: in 2026, air-defence failures are political ones first, military ones second.

Sources: Defense News; The Globe and Mail; Stars and Stripes; CBC News; Wikipedia (2026 Ukrainian drone incursions into Baltic states).