The Auvere Power Plant in Narva, Estonia. Photo: Enefit
An unidentified drone flying from Russian airspace has struck a power plant in Estonia, while another has crashed in neighbouring Latvia, officials in the two Baltic countries said on Wednesday, amid a massive Ukrainian drone strike on northwestern Russia.
According to a statement from the Latvian Defence Ministry, the country’s air force “identified a foreign unmanned aircraft entering Latvian airspace from Russia” early on Wednesday morning, before the drone exploded harmlessly in the Kraslava region, near the border with Belarus.
A spokesperson for Estonia’s Internal Security Service said that another drone had hit the Auvere Power Plant in Narva, on the border with Russia, adding that nobody was injured in the incident. Auvere’s operator said that there was no immediate damage to either the power plant, or to Estonia’s electricity grid.
The authorities in both countries confirmed that the drone strikes appeared to have been accidental, with Latvian Prime Minister Evika Siliņa saying on X that the drone that crashed in Latvia was likely launched from Ukraine.
The drone incursions coincided with a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack on Russia overnight, during which Russian air defences reportedly downed over 389 drones, including over the Leningrad and Pskov regions which border the Baltic states.
In a post on Russian messaging app MAX on Wednesday morning, the Leningrad region’s governor, Alexander Drozdenko, said that up to 56 drones had been destroyed over the region, which surrounds Russia’s second city St. Petersburg.
The attacks caused a fire at the Russian port of Ust-Luga, near the border with Estonia, and struck a residential building next to the local headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service in the city of Vyborg, near Russia’s border with Finland.
According to an estimate by Russian state-owned news agency TASS, the overnight attack was the largest of its kind by Ukraine to date.
On Monday, a similar Ukrainian attack on the Russian port of Primorsk, also in the Leningrad region, caused a massive fire at the port’s oil terminal and saw another stray drone crash in Lithuania, near its border with Belarus. The Lithuanian Defence Ministry confirmed on Tuesday that the drone was Ukrainian.
