Police officers stand at the site of damage after drones crashed at an oil storage facility in Rezekne, Latvia, May 7.Janis Laizans/Reuters
Latvia’s government has collapsed, the result of an incursion by a pair of Ukrainian drones that the director of a NATO think tank says were likely under the control of artificial intelligence and may have autonomously selected a target in eastern Latvia − a potential first in warfare.
The incursion, which saw the drones strike an oil facility in eastern Latvia, provoked a major political scandal that on Thursday led to the resignation of Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina, just four days after she demanded and received the resignation of defence minister Andris Spruds over the incident. Mr. Spruds later announced that his left-wing party would no longer support Ms. Silina’s centre-right government.
No attempt was made to shoot down the drones, and air-raid sirens sounded only after both had already struck the oil terminal.
It is a potentially significant moment, possibly the first time AI has selected its own target on a battlefield.
The Ukrainian drones were hundreds of kilometres away from the humans who launched them when they changed direction and struck an empty fuel depot in the city of Rezekne.
Latvia's Prime Minister Evika Silina arrives for the EU Summit in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, on April 23.Petros Karadjias/The Associated Press
The emerging story contradicts sharply what Kyiv says happened on May 7: That the drones were intentionally redirected into Latvia by Russian electronic warfare measures.
Janis Sarts, director of NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, told The Globe and Mail that it was more likely to have been an “autonomous decision” of drones that had been programmed to hit Russian oil facilities but, after having their navigation systems jammed by Russian electronic warfare, chose to strike a similar-looking structure in Latvia instead.
“The two drones, when they observed something similar, decided that this is a good place to strike,” he said.
Both Ukraine and Russia have acknowledged employing AI-enhanced drones in the now-four-year-old conflict.
While the scandal has been driven by the military’s lack of response to the incursion, there has also been a quieter debate about how and why the two Ukrainian drones struck the territory of a NATO member.
Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on social media earlier this week that the incident was “the result of Russian electronic warfare deliberately diverting Ukrainian drones from their targets in Russia.”
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If that’s what happened, it would be the first known incident of Russia taking control of Ukrainian attack drones and redirecting them toward a target in a third country.
Mr. Sarts said he was skeptical of Ukraine’s account. “I’m not sure the electromagnetic warfare is that capable,” he said in an interview in the Riga headquarters of NATO’s StratCom Centre, using another term for electronic warfare.
He said that while electronic warfare had evolved to the point where it is possible to jam the navigation systems of an incoming drone, knocking it off course, no country has demonstrated the ability to select a new target for an attack drone.
It was more likely, Mr. Sarts said, that the two drones, after being knocked off course by Russian jamming, selected a new target that resembled what they had been programmed to hit. “It’s all autonomous. It picked its target.”
The main focus of NATO’s StratCom Centre is countering information warfare, a field that has become increasingly interrelated with monitoring developments in artificial intelligence.
Mr. Sarts said there was a “bias” toward accepting the Ukrainian version of events because the country is a partner that NATO has been supporting through four years of war. However, the Latvian army’s top drone expert has also suggested that AI could be to blame for the May 7 strike.
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“Long-range drones have the germs of artificial intelligence. They search for targets that are preprogrammed into the drones. That’s probably why it crashed into barrels at an oil terminal that are visually similar to targets on Russian territory,” Modris Kairiss, head of the Latvian army’s Autonomous Systems Competence Centre, told the country’s LSM public broadcaster immediately after the incident.
“If a drone has lost its way, it does not distinguish whether the forest is on the Russian side of the border or the Latvian side. The artificial intelligence tools used in drones are not yet sufficiently developed.”
Two Ukrainian military sources consulted by The Globe differed over the AI-failure theory. While one said the facts of what happened had already been established, and made public by Mr. Sybiha, the other acknowledged the possibility that the drones could have mistakenly hit the Latvian facility while en route to strike Russian oil infrastructure in the Baltic Sea ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk.
Both those Russian ports are almost directly north of Rezekne.
The Globe is not identifying the two Ukrainian sources because they were not authorized to publicly discuss such a sensitive matter.
Ukraine has carried out a series of spectacular long-range drone strikes in recent months that have dented Russia’s war machine, as well as the country’s oil-and-gas driven economy. The threat of Ukrainian drone strikes recently forced the Kremlin to dramatically scale back the annual Victory Day military parade in Moscow.
“If you want to have these long-strike capabilities, which, as you can see, are changing the dynamic, you can’t rely on remote control. You have to automate them,” Mr. Sarts said. “By definition, that means you give up the decision as to which exact target is going to be hit to the system – not a human.”