The script:

NATO foreign ministers are meeting in Sweden as the alliance’s easternmost region is plagued by drone incursions. Latvia issued another drone alert today after detecting at least one flying into its territory, and NATO jets shot down a drone in Estonia on Tuesday. Ukraine says it’s aiming the long-range drones at Russia and accuses Moscow of redirecting them to Baltic countries.

Tuesday also saw alerts in Lithuania, where lawmakers headed to a bunker during an air raid alert. The Defense Ministry warned people across the capital, Vilnius, to take cover when a suspected drone breached the airspace. It’s the first major alert in a NATO and EU member state since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. One group improvised when their birthday celebration was interrupted. (Singing in foreign language.)

Still, the alert was met with mixed reactions.

“It was terrifying. We were unprepared and we didn’t know what we should do.”

“I was at home taking a shower when I got the alert message. Honestly, I didn’t get scared.”

The airspace over Vilnius airport was temporarily closed while authorities searched for the drone. It’s the latest in a series of such incursions in Baltic and Nordic countries. A NATO fighter jet shot down a drone in Estonia on Tuesday, and a drone hit a fuel storage depot in Latvia last week. Ukraine and some Baltic officials accuse Russia of jamming or redirecting drones fired by Ukraine.

Lithuania’s Prime Minister has issued this warning:

“We live next to a war in which rapidly evolving technologies, UAVs and electronic warfare measures are being used. This is the new reality to which the state must adapt quickly and responsibly. War is closer than ever before.”

Ahead of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Sweden, the alliance’s chief vowed a devastating response to any attack and said that Ukraine is not to blame for the stray drones.

“Ukrainian drones are there not because Ukraine wants to work with drones — they are there because of the full-scale Russian attack against Ukraine, Ukraine having to defend itself. And NATO is always prepared for every eventuality. What happened over the last couple of days again is what we trained and prepared for, and this is a calm, decisive and proportionate response to any threat.”

More than a dozen NATO states have called for an urgent strengthening of air and missile defenses on the alliance’s eastern flank.

DW correspondent Terry Schultz is in Sweden for that NATO meeting in Helsingborg, and she’s just returned from a Swedish exercise where civilian and military personnel practiced their response to a missile or drone attack.

Anchor: Welcome, Terry. Clearly it’s not just the Baltic states — Sweden is taking this threat very seriously.

Terry Schultz: Absolutely. Even though these most recent incursions have, as you say, only affected the frontline states — the Baltic states and Finland — those are Sweden’s closest neighbors. And there have been drone sightings here in the past. Remember last year when they were seen all across Europe? There were incidents here in Sweden. So they indeed do take it seriously, and in fact have one of the most advanced counter-drone systems already in place, for example around their airport.

But this exercise today was really about a more serious scenario, and that is the potential of a missile or an armed drone striking a populated area where there would be casualties, there would be people to rescue. That’s what they were really working on today — how civilian and military forces can join up and really take care of saving the survivors, take care to spread the patients out among hospitals, look at the other resources. It was really quite interesting, all in line with this whole-of-society approach that the Nordic and Baltic countries do so well.

I spoke with Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson about some other ways that Sweden is trying to prepare itself for what possibly could be the reality of war.

Pål Jonson: First, learning from the Ukrainians — they are the best. They developed these capabilities in two years, because this war did not start as a drone war per se, but the drones became very important. Because the Ukrainians were running low on ammunition, so they went over to that, and they know how to operate the drones very well. They also have an industrial base that can scale up the production. Of course, the goal for the Ukrainians is to produce 7 million drones this year. So they are efficient in their industrial base, and they know how to operate things.

Terry Schultz: So there have actually been Ukrainian soldiers coming from the frontline, from the battlefield, and training NATO soldiers — most recently here in Sweden. And while the Ukrainians tend to overcome the NATO soldiers for the most part in these exercises, as we’ve seen lately, Pål Jonson says they’re learning many lessons each time, and that they’re very grateful to Ukraine for sharing this expertise.

Anchor: Terry, tell us more about these recent incidents being blamed on Ukrainian drones being hijacked by Russia.

Terry Schultz: Exactly. Even while we were out at this exercise, there were two more incidents in Latvia and Lithuania. So clearly this kind of thing is on the rise. Now, what all NATO experts and the Baltic leaders say is that these are cases of Russia reprogramming Ukrainian drones — because we do know they are Ukrainian drones, not drones coming from Russia. And so they are very worried about this, not only for the question of safety on the ground, but because Russia is using this as a narrative — possibly, they worry, as a pretext for attacking frontline states.

Russia is claiming that the Baltic states are letting Ukraine use their territory and use their airspace to attack Russia. That, of course, could then give Russia the pretext in its mind to attack these frontline countries, saying that they have themselves decided to enter the conflict. Now, it is not true at all, according to the leaders of all of these countries and from everything I’ve heard from experts. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte goes so far as to call this a lie, and says Russia knows it’s lying.

Anchor: Well, recent developments in Ukraine and indeed in the United States have prompted most NATO countries to increase their defense spending significantly. Despite this, Secretary General Mark Rutte has been complaining that some countries are still not spending enough. Is that something we’re likely to hear more of when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrives in Sweden tomorrow?

Terry Schultz: I think that’s a pretty regular complaint coming from the United States, echoed by Secretary General Mark Rutte. It is true that most countries — in fact, all of them except for Spain — have agreed to increase their defense budgets to 5% of their GDP by the year 2030. They will be tracking it closely inside NATO, and of course in Washington, as to whether countries are on that path to spend up to 5% of GDP.

But there’s going to be a lot of other questions here at this meeting as well. Of course, we’ve heard these confusing statements out of the Trump administration. First, that they were going to pull 5,000 troops out of Germany in punishment for what President Trump felt was inappropriate comments from Friedrich Merz. Then we found out that maybe that’s not going to happen, but 4,000 troops that were due to rotate into Poland would be kept home instead. Now it’s unclear whether even that will happen.