Russian drone incursions across Europe spark NATO concerns amid the Ukraine war

Drone warfare as seen in Russia's war in Ukraine is sparking alarm in NATO and Europe that its forces are unprepared to fight unmanned aerial vehicles.

RIGA, Latvia — In a nondescript factory on the edge of Latvia’s capital, a small team is trying to solve a continental-sized problem: How can Europe protect itself from swarms of Russian attack drones?

Used on an almost nightly basis in the war in Ukraine, a spate of mysterious drone incursions above airports and sensitive sites has also highlighted Europe’s vulnerability to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and sparked alarm that NATO nations are unprepared to defend themselves from the cheap but effective weaponry.

As a result, European leaders have backed plans for a “drone wall,” a network of sensors and weapons to detect, track and neutralize intruding UAVs, and in Riga, the team at a small tech company called Origin is on the forefront of this new, high-tech battleground.

Its solution, a 3-foot-tall interceptor drone named “Blaze.” Powered by an artificial intelligence system, it has been trained to recognize a hostile target and navigate close to it. It will then alert a human operator, who will make a decision on whether to intercept and push a button which explodes a 28-ounce warhead, self-destructing the drone and hopefully bringing down its target too.

The Blaze interceptor drone, developed by Origin. Alex Holmes / NBC News“We don’t fly these systems. These systems fly themselves,” Origin CEO Agris Kipurs told NBC News last week in an interview outside the factory, adding that Blaze addressed “the problem of relatively cheap, low-flying threats that are deployed in volumes.”