The foreign minister of Latvia has underscored the need to enhance capabilities to quickly detect and accurately intercept drones. Latvia is one of the three Baltic countries and borders Russia.
Baiba Braze spoke in an interview with NHK in Tokyo on Thursday. This comes after Russian drones violated the airspace of two Eastern European countries — Poland and Romania — earlier this month.
Braze pointed to the difficulty of responding to drones. She said, “Shooting a flying object down can be dangerous because it can be a civilian object.”
She also noted that “you want to take out drones but you don’t want them falling on a place where people live.”
Braze also said Russians “think they can win the war, but they’re hurting badly economically, demographically, politically.”
The minister emphasized that Russia needs to be weakened. She called for sanctions on Moscow to be tightened in the field of energy, such as crude oil and natural gas.