A drone struck an electrical generator outside the Barakah nuclear power plant in Abu Dhabi last Sunday, triggering a fire. Two further drones were intercepted before reaching the site. By Tuesday, technical tracking had confirmed all three flew in from Iraqi territory.
The UAE foreign ministry moved without ceremony, calling on Baghdad to “prevent all hostile acts originating from its territory urgently and without conditions.”
Three days later and three thousand kilometres to the north, school children and nursery pupils in Vilnius were directed into shelters after Lithuanian military radar detected unmanned vehicle activity near the border with Belarus.
The two events share one mechanism. Iran puts pressure on Gulf states via armed groups operating from Iraqi soil. Russia puts pressure on Baltic states via electronic jamming and drone redirection, using Belarus as a geographic buffer.
The ceasefire brokered by Pakistan in April, which paused the Iran war, has not paused the drone traffic. That truce preserved the intensity of what came before it, minus the formal attribution.
Iraq Can’t, or Won’t, Halt It
Baghdad’s predicament runs far beyond what diplomatic notes can quickly resolve. Iran’s influence in Iraq expanded dramatically after the US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, creating a power vacuum that Tehran filled by funding, arming and training a network of paramilitaries that have since grown into a formidable parallel security structure operating alongside – and often beyond the control of – the Iraqi state.
The Popular Mobilisation Forces, an official paramilitary body comprising dozens of Iran-backed factions, had struck US military bases in the country more than 600 times since the Iran war began.
An Iraqi security official said Arab countries had provided “only accusations” without concrete evidence, adding that Baghdad required “evidence and precise information so that Iraqi authorities can take the appropriate measures.” The position is legally defensible. Judging by years of precedent, it is also a door left ajar for further attacks.
Last month, several Gulf countries – including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – and Jordan demanded in a joint statement that Baghdad act immediately to stop attacks from its territory by pro-Iran armed groups. That produced little visible effect.
Iraq sits between a government that formally condemns drone strikes and a paramilitary ecosystem that carries them out. Getting Baghdad to rein in formations its own constitution recognises is a structural question, and how the Gulf states and Washington frame their next response will determine what ensues.
Lithuania’s Unnerving Wednesday
In Vilnius, the alert lasted roughly an hour.
Residents were sent to underground car parks, parliament into bunkers, and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda and Prime Minister Inga Ruginiene to secure locations. No drone was ever found. The airport closed and train traffic halted across the capital.
Lithuania’s Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas told reporters there is a “high possibility” more unmanned aerial incidents will materialise, offered not as anxiety but as institutional expectation. In fairness, the record bears him out: there have been six reported or suspected drone incursions recorded in Baltic and Finnish airspace since the beginning of the month.
Latvia’s government had already resigned over its handling of multiple earlier incidents before Vilnius experienced its morning alarm.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated that “Russia and Belarus bear direct responsibility for drones endangering the lives and security of people in our eastern flank.” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called the incidents a “coordinated provocation.”
Attribution is contested in individual cases: some of the drones are Ukrainian vehicles redirected by Russian electronic jamming; others remain unidentified. What is not contested is that Russia has the means to push unmanned aircraft into Baltic airspace, and Belarus provides the geographic depth that makes real-time attribution close to impossible.
Below the Threshold
General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave the most explicit formal name to the Gulf version of the arrangement. Speaking to Pentagon reporters earlier this month, Caine described over ten post-ceasefire Iranian attacks on US forces as “all below the threshold of restarting major combat operations at this point.”
That operational concept, strictly speaking, governs what is happening in the Baltic too, with the difference that it is the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation rather than the US military that must calibrate a collective response, and NATO’s consensus-based decision-making moves on a different timescale entirely.
A regional security analysis described the post-ceasefire Gulf as trending towards “a ‘cold peace’ – marked by persistent competition in hybrid domains.” The Baltic states already live that condition daily.
The Case for Structured Accountability
With Baghdad, Western powers hold considerable economic leverage, through oil revenue systems, reconstruction funding and international financial institutions. Conditioning those connections on documented reductions in militia access to drone infrastructure is the kind of accountability that has produced results in comparable settings before.
Gulf states have every incentive to treat Iraq as a potential partner in regional security rather than a permanent source of disruption, and some of that diplomatic groundwork is already under way, as the joint GCC-Jordan statement last month attested.
Belarus is a harder case. Alexander Lukashenko’s government has built its position entirely on Moscow’s protection, and the levers available to Brussels are fewer.
The EU drone detection and interception network proposed at the Copenhagen summit last autumn, known in policy circles as the eastern flank “drone wall,” offers technical resilience that can outlast the current political impasse.
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