KAPO Director General Margo Palloson said it plainly after Auvere: “We can assume we will see more such incidents.” He was right.
The night of 30–31 March brought the most intense episode yet on Estonian soil. Surveillance detected high activity near the border from 9:30 p.m.; by morning, 49 public reports had been received and three potential crash sites were being checked. Debris was confirmed in Hammaste village, Kastre Municipality, Tartu County — the third drone found on Estonian territory. Civil aviation was disrupted: a Finnair Helsinki–Tartu flight turned back, the morning return service was cancelled, and NATO jets scrambled from Ämari. (ERR, Estonian World)
Colonel Uku Arold, head of strategic communications at the Defence Forces, was unambiguous: “Several drones drifted into Estonian territory during the night, without anyone asking Estonia for permission.” He added: “After last week’s drone incursion, Russia has tried to promote the narrative that Estonia and the Baltics allow Ukrainian jets to use their airspace for attacks.” (ERR)
“The drones were shot from Estonia!”
On 2 April, MK.ru published an interview with Major General of Aviation Vladimir Popov, a decorated military pilot, under the headline: “Russian General: Drones are being launched at Ust-Luga from the Baltic countries.”
His argument: Ukrainian drones cannot physically fly 1,450 kilometres from Ukraine to Ust-Luga. Atmospheric pressure changes every hundred kilometres. Wind conditions shift. Magnetic declination varies. When Popov himself flew low-altitude missions from the Baltic states, navigators corrected his route every ten to fifteen minutes. Drones have no navigators. Therefore, the drones must have been launched from Baltic training grounds or ships in neutral Baltic waters.
The article ran alongside a map — a bird’s-eye illustration of Estonia with swarms of Ukrainian-flag drones flying over Tallinn, Tartu, and Narva. The map circulated widely on its own, detached from any text.
The technical argument has a problem: Ukrainian long-range strike drones carry modern inertial and satellite guidance and have repeatedly struck targets more than 1,000 kilometres from their launch points throughout the war. Popov’s calculation assumes no such technology exists. It does not reflect the documented operational record of the drones involved.
“Estonian journalists proved it.”
A week after Auvere, on 1 April, MK.ru escalated its activities. The headline: “Named: the villages in Estonia and Latvia from which Ukrainian Armed Forces drones were launched toward Ust-Luga.” The subheadline: “Estonian journalists proved that Ukrainian drones flew from the Baltics.”
No Estonian journalists proved any such thing. The source named in the article is Sergei Vasilyev, described as the founder of the Telegram channel “Antifascists of the Baltics.” Vasilyev is not a journalist. He is a documented Russian influence operation figure whose activities in the Baltic states have been monitored by regional security services. The village names he supplied have no basis in any verified source.
“Signs indicate we are being lied to”
A post published by Estonian politician Varro Vooglaid on 31 March claims that Ukrainians have deliberately flown drones over Estonian territory and that the public is being misled about it. It presents this as the most likely explanation without offering evidence and dismisses the official account without justification.
The post further suggests that the Estonian government may have tacitly approved such overflights or concealed them from the public. This framing shifts responsibility onto Ukraine and domestic authorities while portraying official information as deceptive.
In doing so, the post echoes pro-Kremlin narratives that depict Ukraine as reckless or provocative and Western governments as untrustworthy, while amplifying distrust toward state institutions without substantiating these claims.
“I am not a supporter of conspiracy theories, BUT…”
Jüri Kivit‘s Facebook post from 26 March opens with an emoji sequence: the Estonian flag, three downward-pointing fingers, the Russian flag. Then the disclaimer: “I am not a supporter of conspiracy theories and other speculations.”
Kivit — a blogger and musician whom Propastop profiled in January 2026 as Estonia’s largest pro-Russian content creator, with close to 41,000 YouTube subscribers and 53,500 TikTok followers — said he was troubled not by the drone itself but by what happened next. All Baltic politicians, all three countries, all saying the same thing at the same time: the drones deviated because of Russian air defenses. “They never agreed so quickly on a single version before.” This synchronization, he argued, was suspicious. “Obviously, politicians and security services of the Baltic countries were aware of the drone flights over our territories.”
“Is Estonia at war?”
The operation’s most carefully constructed contribution came from Tribuna.ee. The article cited real facts — a named Estonian drone photographer, Kaupo Kalda classifying the Auvere device as a combat type; the genuine five-hour gap between the impact and the public alert, accurate flight speed calculations—and used them as steps toward a conclusion identical to what Rossiya 1 had been broadcasting since 25 March: that Estonia is “consciously and organizationally participating” in the war by providing Ukraine with an air corridor.
The ninety-minute flight-time calculation assumes the drone crossed Estonia’s full 294-kilometre border; KAPO stated it entered near Narva and hit Auvere within minutes. The geographic pattern of drone falls—closer to the border in each Baltic state—is presented as proof of deliberate routing, ignoring that Russian GPS jamming would produce exactly this pattern. The piece closes by demanding the government release classified radar data to disprove the claim, treating the inevitable refusal as confirmation.
“It’s the ruling party’s fault!”
The drone incidents also provided ready material for domestic political point-scoring. Sandra Laur, an Isamaa politician and one of the party’s more active social media voices, used the airspace violations not to address Russian aggression — the root cause of every drone that crossed into Estonian territory — but to attack the rival Reform Party government. The framing was telling: in Laur’s telling, the problem was not that Russia is waging a war on Estonia’s doorstep but that the current government had somehow failed to prevent its consequences. It is a move structurally identical to what Kivit and Vooglaid were doing, just without the explicit pro-Kremlin framing—redirecting public anxiety away from the aggressor and toward domestic political targets. Whether intentional or not, the effect is the same: the narrative benefits.
Conclusion
The “green corridor” narrative did not need to be true to be useful. It needed only to be repeatable — and the conditions that produced Auvere have not changed.
Ust-Luga was struck on March 22, 25, 27, 29, and 31—five times in ten days. On April 7 it was hit again, with three storage tanks reported damaged and Russian air defenses claiming to have downed 22 drones. (UNITED24 Media) Russian pro-war bloggers report that parade rehearsals in Moscow and St. Petersburg have been cancelled ahead of 9 May, with the air component of the Victory Day parade scrapped entirely Censor.NET — the concern being that even an air raid siren over Red Square, with no strike at all, would shatter the image of control the Kremlin works to project on its most politically important day. Kyiv Post
