Ukraine signs drone deal with Latvia to boost air defense

Ukraine and Latvia turned the Tallinn summit into a test case for a new wartime supply chain: cheaper drones, shared production, and faster air defense built by countries on NATO’s eastern edge. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy met Latvian Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs in Estonia’s capital and said the two sides agreed to deepen joint drone production and support air and missile-defense capabilities.

The Ukrainian president’s office said it was Zelenskiy’s first meeting with Kulbergs, and that the leaders discussed security cooperation in practical terms rather than ceremony. Zelenskiy proposed a Drone Deal format with Latvia to help build a multi-layered air-defense system, while Ukraine said it would send experts to Latvia to exchange experience and help protect Latvian airspace. That matters operationally because it moves the partnership beyond political backing and into training, tactics and industrial coordination, the areas most likely to affect how quickly Ukraine and its allies can absorb and field anti-drone capabilities.

Ukrainian officials said the Latvia agreement was the sixth Drone Deal Ukraine had concluded with partners, framing it as part of a multi-year cooperation program with individual countries. The point of that format is not only to buy more drones, but to turn Ukrainian battlefield know-how into a repeatable model for defending critical and civilian infrastructure against mass attacks. In a war increasingly shaped by cheap one-way attack drones and missile strikes, that kind of industrial and technical sharing can matter as much as major weapons packages.

The timing also reflected a wider Baltic calculation. Estonia hosted the NB8 summit in Tallinn on June 9, with Ukraine, European security, defense-industry cooperation, competitiveness and artificial intelligence on the agenda. The Nordic-Baltic states said in February that they had already provided more than 42 billion euros in military, financial and humanitarian support to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began. Regional concern had sharpened further after a NATO air-policing jet shot down a drone over southern Estonia on May 19, underscoring why lower-cost air defenses are now a priority.

The summit followed an April meeting of NB8 foreign ministers in Kuressaare that warned of heightened geopolitical tensions as Russia’s war of aggression continued. Against that backdrop, the Latvia deal was more than a symbolic handshake: it was another step in building a regional air-defense network in which Ukraine is both beneficiary and supplier.