When the Sky Stops Being Neutral: Jets, Drones and the New Face of European Pressure
On a clear morning over the Baltic, the thread of routine that ties a small nation to its skies was snapped. Estonia’s air traffic controllers recorded three MiG-31 fighter jets crossing into their airspace without permission, lingering for twelve minutes — long enough to be a message, short enough to be a provocation. Tallinn summoned Moscow’s top diplomat and called the maneuver “unprecedentedly brazen.”
“Russia has violated Estonian airspace four times already this year, which is unacceptable in itself,” Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said, his voice tight with the kind of anger that comes from watching a fragile peace be tested repeatedly. “This latest episode, with three fighter jets inside our borders, demands a rapid strengthening of political and economic pressure.”
The incident landed amid heightened nervousness across Europe after more than 20 Russian drones swept through Polish airspace on the night of September 9–10. NATO jets scrambled and shot some of them down; others traced dark arcs across the continent’s radar screens and left behind the unnerving thought that old rules of engagement are colliding with new, cheaper technologies.
Small country, big stakes
Walk Tallinn’s cobbled Old Town and you can still taste centuries of trade and conquest — Hanseatic merchants, Swedish governors, Soviet patrols. Today, the threat is both modern and intimate: a fighter jet’s shadow over a fishing village, a drone’s buzz over a border town, a satellite image used in a foreign newsroom. For Estonians, who live within sight of the sea and within earshot of distant geopolitics, every incursion feels personal.
“We wake up, we check the sky,” said Anu Mägi, 62, who runs a small café near the port where sailors drink their morning black coffee. “It used to be stories from TV. Now it’s our reality.”
That reality is being felt across alliances. European Commission chief Kaja Kallas called the violation “an extremely dangerous provocation,” and tweeted that it was the third such violation of EU airspace in days. “Putin is testing the West’s resolve. We must not show weakness,” she wrote, pledging support for member states to strengthen defenses with European resources.
From buzzing drones to boardroom pitches: Ukraine’s defence tech moment
When the headlines stack up — fighter jets over Estonia, drones over Poland — it’s easy to miss how those same technologies are reshaping warfare on the ground in Ukraine. In Lviv, under banners and neon-lit stalls, Ukraine staged its biggest defence tech fair to date, the kind of event that looks, for a few days, like a cross between a comic-con and a military expo.
A giant screen played an action-trailer style promo; young engineers hovered over laptop arrays; small drones — the ones that have become unsettlingly ubiquitous in the skies over eastern Ukraine — hummed in demonstration zones. “Forget Silicon Valley — it’s the past. Ukraine is the future,” proclaimed Europe’s Commissioner for Defence, setting a tone equal parts defiant and entrepreneurial.
The point was not vanity. It was survival. Kyiv’s forces face nightly drone swarms launched by Russian units; the answer hasn’t been only expensive missiles and fighter jets. It’s been ingenuity — electronic jammers, homegrown interceptor drones, and the repurposing of consumer quadcopters into precision, low-cost munitions.
AFP’s analysis of Ukrainian Air Force data shows Kyiv is intercepting more than 80% of thousands of drones fired at it each month. Contrast that with the Polish episode: NATO jets shot down fewer than five of the roughly twenty drones that had crossed into Poland. The message is stark. A networked, low-cost approach can blunt an asymmetric aerial weapon better than an expensive scramble of missiles.
Hardware, money and the friction of investment
Still, Ukraine’s tech ecosystem is hungry. “Foreign investment in military tech here is peanuts,” said Yaroslav Azhnyuk, CEO of Fourth Law, a Kyiv-based firm building AI systems for attack drones. “We have the lessons of combat. We have the prototypes. Investors have the money — but there’s a gap between sympathy and capital.”
The Lviv fair closed with promises: more than $100 million in planned foreign investment announced by Brave1, the government platform overseeing military innovation. Swarmer, an AI drone company, announced the largest public deal — $15 million from US investors. For perspective, a member of parliament recently put Ukraine’s daily wartime expenditure at roughly $170 million.
That mismatch is telling. Even with headline-grabbing commitments, the amount of capital flowing into Ukraine’s defence sector is small relative to the scale of the need. Regulations, export controls, and the thinness of global defence supply chains complicate the picture. Entrepreneurs like Artem Moroz, head of investor relations at Brave1, are pragmatic. “It’s a learning curve,” he said. “Rounds are getting bigger, but we need speed.”
- Ukraine repurposes consumer drones as attack platforms and blow-up interceptors.
- Electronic jammers and low-cost interceptors are part of Kyiv’s layered defence approach.
- More than 25 companies have begun shifting some production to Ukraine, according to the defence minister.
Why this matters to you — and the world
We live in an era where a pocket-sized drone is as strategically consequential as a fighter jet. That should give anyone pause. Democratised technologies — AI, drones, encrypted communications — have lowered barriers to offensive action. Small states and non-state actors can now project power in ways that once required large militaries and national budgets.
Questions bloom: How does an alliance built for the mid-20th century meet a 21st-century threat? Do we double down on high-end interceptors and risk being outmaneuvered by swarms of inexpensive drones? Or do we invest in distributed, agile defences — jammers, AI-enabled interceptors, manufacturing capacity across Europe?
“This is about resilience,” said Oleksandr Yarmak, a commander in the Nemesis unit. “We can build a culture of defence here: fast iterations, shared knowledge, joint factories. But that takes time and partners.”
Ukraine has sought those partners: a new Ukraine-Poland group on drone threats, a co-production deal in Denmark, companies shifting some output back to Ukrainian soil. It’s a patchwork strategy of alliances, private capital and battlefield-tested innovation.
Back in Tallinn, locals absorb the news through familiar filters: a fisherman checking his nets, a student debating Baltic security in a café. “We are not looking for war,” said Jüri Kask, 34, a marine engineering student. “But we are learning how to be ready. That’s our lesson.”
Ready for what? That’s the question that follows you out of the story. Ready for persistent pressure, for ambiguous attacks, for the slow-burn of hybrid warfare that blurs the boundaries between conflict and everyday life? How do democracies maintain values under strain, and how do they keep the skies safe without turning them into militarised corridors?
These are not just technical problems. They are questions about priorities, budgets, and the shape of solidarity. When a small nation’s airspace is crossed for a dozen minutes, it ripples outward: to the markets that underwrite defence firms, to the alliances that promise mutual defense, and to the cafes and classrooms of cities like Tallinn and Lviv where citizens track every development with more than curiosity — with a stake in how the story ends.
So read the radar blips, count the drone swarms, and ask: are we prepared to fund the future of deterrence, or will we learn the price of neglect only when the next incursion becomes harder to reverse?
