By Olha Chepil and AFP | 2024-06-10

KYIV -- Six NATO countries that border Russia have agreed to erect a "drone wall" to protect their borders in response to Russian provocations, including weaponized migration and attempts to revise maritime borders.

The interior ministers of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Finland and Norway reached the agreement during a meeting in Latvia on May 23-24.

The plan involves the creation of a coordinated system of unmanned aerial vehicles along their nations' borders with Russia not only to prevent smuggling and migration but also to shore up defenses.

All six countries have recently faced provocations from Russia.

Russia's Ministry of Defense in May briefly published a draft resolution that would redefine Russia's maritime borders with Finland and Lithuania in the Baltic Sea in January 2025.

The proposed policy, which the Kremlin later removed from the site, would see Moscow declaring Finnish and Lithuanian areas of the sea as Russian.

"The level of hybrid threats is rising," Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst and director of the Penta Center for Political Studies, told Kontur.

"The Kremlin is resorting to extortion and wants to revise the maritime borders with the Baltic countries," Fesenko said.

Meanwhile, Finland, Poland and other nearby countries have accused Russia and Belarus of weaponizing migration against them.

Finland late last year shut its land borders with Russia late last year amid an influx of arrivals from countries including Syria and Somalia.

"Since 2021, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have been hit by a migration crisis manufactured by the Russian and Belarusian regimes," Stanislav Zhelikhovsky, a political scientist and international relations analyst, told Kontur.

"Those countries are building different types of barriers on the border with Belarus -- not just ... a wall or a barbed wire fence but motion sensors and video surveillance."

"But now that protection requires another level," he said.

Reconnaissance and protection

While details have been scant so far, the coordinated system of drones likely will be used first and foremost for reconnaissance along the nations' borders with Russia, say analysts.

"The way it will probably work is if there's some kind of danger, the drones will be deployed and will observe what's happening," Zhelikhovsky said.

"There may be infrared or heat sensors, and the drones will send information to the border guards so they can respond," he added.

"The drones will primarily have a reconnaissance function," Alexander Kovalenko, a military and political analyst for the website InfoResist in Odesa, told Kontur.

However, it is "not out of the question that they'll ... be able to carry out combat missions if, for example, sabotage and spy teams infiltrate from the other side, and so on," Kovalenko said.

Such an undertaking will most likely require drones that hold their battery charge for a long time, and these models are more expensive, he noted.

"It's unlikely that these will be FPV [first-person view] drones because you need to charge them, and the charge doesn't last long enough to support a long flight."

A collective plan

Cooperation on using modern technologies to protect borders will be key to guaranteeing security and stability in the region, analysts say.

Lithuanian Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė in May pointed to the possibility of using European Union funds for the drone wall.

"If we agree on common solutions, we could apply for European funds, if we apply as a region, there is a high probability that we will get funding from the European Commission," Bilotaitė said after the May 23-24 interior ministers' meeting, according to Lithuanian media.

"If it is organized, it is much more profitable, because if you participate in the negotiations as a region, you can get a better deal," she said.

"This initiative is definitely the right way to go given that in the future [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is planning to carry out hybrid attacks on the neighboring states," Zhelikhovsky said.

"Right now he's stepping up his aggression against Ukraine and gathering different kinds of weapons in his own country, particularly from China, Iran and North Korea. All of this presents a threat to Russia's neighbors," Zhelikhovsky said.

"We're now seeing seamless cooperation on security," Fesenko noted.

"All the Scandinavian countries are NATO countries, and all the Baltic countries are also NATO countries. So this is their mutual plan against Russia, and it's a very positive thing."