Latvia's defence minister Andris Sprūds resigns after Ukrainian drones hit Rēzekne oil tanks; Col. Raivis Melnis named successor

On Sunday, May 10, 2026, Andris Sprūds, Latvia's Minister of Defence and a member of The Progressives party, resigned three days after two stray drones believed to have been launched by Ukraine crossed in from Russian territory and exploded at an oil storage facility in the eastern town of Rēzekne. The resignation came hours after Prime Minister Evika Siliņa of New Unity (JV) publicly demanded Sprūds step down, saying she had lost confidence in his handling of the drone wall and broader defence-sector failures. Siliņa appointed army colonel Raivis Melnis as the new defence minister. Reuters first reported the resignation from Riga.

What happened on Sunday in Riga

Siliņa published her demand on X shortly before Sprūds called a hastily convened press conference on Sunday evening, at which he announced he would step down. He framed the resignation as taking political responsibility and as a way to protect the National Armed Forces (NBS) from being drawn into a pre-election political campaign. The PM separately confirmed she had informed Sprūds and the coalition partners of her decision earlier in the day, and that Melnis had accepted the offer to take over the portfolio.

Siliņa was unusually direct in her public reasoning. She wrote that Latvia's defence sector is currently allocated 5 percent of gross domestic product—a historically high share—amounting to roughly €2 billion a year, and that this scale of public money carries significantly greater responsibility toward society. She criticised what she called the insufficiently rapid adoption of Ukraine's practical experience in developing anti-drone systems, despite Kyiv's repeated willingness to share expertise after earlier border incidents.

The Rēzekne drone incident in detail

The trigger event happened in the early hours of Thursday, May 7, 2026. Several unmanned aerial vehicles entered Latvian airspace from Russia, and two of them crashed in the Latgale region of eastern Latvia. One exploded at an oil storage facility in Rēzekne, roughly 40 km (25 miles) from the Russian border, damaging four empty oil tanks. Police and firefighters later confirmed possible drone debris at the site, and residents told Reuters they had heard blasts, with some packing suitcases.

Latvian authorities issued drone alerts to residents along the Russian border between 4:09 a.m. and 8:51 a.m. local time (roughly 0109–0551 GMT), urging them to stay indoors. Schools in several border municipalities were closed for the day. French military jets of the multinational NATO Baltic Air Police mission deployed in Lithuania were scrambled to the area during the alert, the Latvian army confirmed. No casualties were reported, but the political shock of an explosive event on the territory of a NATO member quickly outran the limited physical damage.

Who is Andris Sprūds, and why he fell

Sprūds is a political scientist by training who was appointed defence minister in 2023 as a candidate of The Progressives, the small left-leaning party that joined Siliņa's centre-right New Unity (JV) coalition. His tenure spanned a period in which Latvia rapidly scaled its defence budget, reintroduced conscription, and championed an EU-wide concept of a drone wall running along the alliance's eastern flank. The political problem on Sunday was that the drone wall he had publicly identified with had not, in practical terms, stopped two stray drones from reaching a Latgale oil storage site.

Pressure built quickly through the week. Opposition parties Latvia First (LPV), the National Alliance (NA) and the United List had already demanded Sprūds's resignation, and Latvian-language media such as BNN ran sharp critiques along the lines of the builder of the drone wall has built nothing. In a Friday interview on Latvian Television's Rīta panorāma, Sprūds had himself stated that drones must be shot down and accepted that the failure was primarily the responsibility of the head of the armed forces and mine as a political leader. He flagged a difficult counterpoint that survives his exit: in the past year, the only confirmed instance of a European country shooting down an intruding drone with a fighter jet was in Poland.

Ukraine's account of how its drones ended up in Latvia

Ukrainian Defence Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X on Sunday that the drones were Ukrainian and had drifted into Latvian territory as a result of Russian electronic warfare deliberately diverting Ukrainian drones from their targets in Russia. That framing converts an embarrassing intrusion into a story about Russian asymmetric tools rather than Ukrainian targeting error.

Sybiha's claim is consistent with Sprūds's own working assumption, conveyed before the resignation, that the drones had been launched against legitimate targets inside the aggressor country and ended up off-course. Whether Russian GPS spoofing and signal jamming explain the full trajectory will be confirmed only after the joint Latvia-Ukraine investigation reports. In the meantime, Sybiha said on Friday that Kyiv is considering sending experts to help strengthen air security over the Baltic states—an offer Latvia is now likely to accept on faster terms than it did after earlier incidents.

Who is Raivis Melnis, the new defence minister

Colonel Raivis Melnis is an NBS infantry officer with extensive experience inside the Latvian armed forces, military education in London, and—per Latvian media at the moment of his appointment—current operational work in Ukraine. Siliņa's public framing emphasised three points: military background rather than political experience, an international perspective, and a practical understanding of modern defence challenges, including Ukraine's drone-war learning curve.

The choice of a serving colonel for a portfolio that controls roughly €2 billion is significant in Latvian politics. It is rare for a uniformed officer rather than a partisan politician to hold the defence brief, and Siliņa explicitly argued that defence and security should sit outside pre-election rhetoric and party interests. Melnis will inherit an internal investigation Sprūds had ordered, an instruction to the NBS to revise the airspace defence plan along the eastern border, and a directive to deploy Latvian-made interceptor drones along that border within weeks, with the first units expected by the end of May.

NATO and the Baltic air-defence push

Latvia and Lithuania reacted to the Rēzekne strike on the same day it happened by formally calling on NATO to boost air defences in the region. Lithuania's Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas said in Vilnius that strengthening anti-drone defence in our region should be a particular emphasis for the alliance, with additional capabilities welcome because this is where we have threats today, and they are not theoretical but real.

NBS commander Kaspars Pudāns acknowledged that the current air-defence model along Latvia's eastern border may need revision and that no solution would be perfect, while emphasising that the armed forces cannot fully replace technical equipment in a short period. The political weight on NATO to upgrade missions like the Baltic Air Policing rotation—French Mirage and Rafale units have been part of recent deployments—will only intensify after a member country's defence minister loses his job over a stray drone.

The pattern: stray drones in late March and now May

The Rēzekne strike is the most consequential incident in a now-recurring pattern. As Reuters noted, several stray Ukrainian military drones hit Latvia and its Baltic NATO neighbours Estonia and Lithuania in late March 2026. One slammed into a chimney at a local power station, while another crash-landed in a frozen lake and exploded. The three Baltic foreign ministers said in April that their countries had never allowed their territories or airspace to be used for drone attacks against targets in Russia—a clear public denial of complicity, and the legal posture under which Sunday's resignation was negotiated.

What is shifting is the political tolerance for stray-drone incidents. A frozen-lake crash is absorbable; a chimney strike at a power station is uncomfortable; an oil-storage explosion that triggers an early-morning shelter-in-place order in a populated district crosses the threshold at which a defence minister loses confidence votes inside his own coalition. Sprūds's exit signals that the next stray drone, wherever in the alliance it falls, is likely to produce a faster political response than the one that took three days in Riga.

What this exposes about Latvia's air-defence model

Three structural questions now sit on Melnis's desk. First, whether Latvia's mix of medium-range air-defence systems—including the recently acquired IRIS-T SLM units shared with neighbours—can integrate cheap, slow, low-flying drones at a cost-per-kill that is fiscally sustainable. Sprūds himself flagged the tension: drone interception over populated areas must factor in safety of people, which limits what fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles can do.

Second, whether Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania can stand up a credible regional drone wall with cooperative radar coverage and shared interceptor drone stockpiles, rather than three national silos. Third, how to fix what Siliņa called systemic problems at the Defence Ministry itself—two state secretaries have left their posts in a short period, signalling churn at the bureaucratic level that no minister can fully compensate for. Anti-drone capability is technical; trust in the ministry is political; both must be rebuilt simultaneously.

What to watch in the coming weeks

Three concrete signals will tell readers whether the resignation translates into operational change. First, whether the promised Latvian-made interceptor drones are deployed along the eastern border by end-May as Sprūds had ordered, and whether NBS publishes a revised airspace defence plan with explicit response thresholds and weapons-release authorities. Second, whether NATO announces additional Baltic Air Policing assets or a dedicated counter-uncrewed-aerial-system (C-UAS) mission, possibly drawing on French, German or British capabilities already operating in Lithuania.

Third, whether Kyiv formalises the offer of Ukrainian experts to advise on anti-drone tactics and shares specific electronic-warfare signatures consistent with Russian diversion claims, allowing Latvia to bring forward joint operational lessons rather than waiting for a long classified investigation. Watch also for Saeima debates: Siliņa's coalition arithmetic remains intact for now, but a defence resignation in an election-cycle year tightens the political margin.

Bottom line

Andris Sprūds is out as Latvia's defence minister because two stray drones fell on a NATO member's oil-storage site in Rēzekne and the political response did not match the size of the 5 percent of GDP defence envelope. Raivis Melnis, an infantry colonel with NBS roots, London military education and current operational work in Ukraine, replaces him with an explicit mandate to depoliticise the portfolio and accelerate anti-drone capability. Ukraine's claim that Russian electronic warfare drove the diversion will be tested in a joint investigation. The harder question for the Baltic coalition is whether NATO's air-defence architecture can adapt fast enough to absorb the next stray drone before it hits something occupied. That is the question Sunday's resignation forces the alliance to answer.