By Andrius Sytas
VILNIUS, July 8 (Reuters) - NATO has agreed to upgrade its decades-old Baltic air policing mission into air defence, giving pilots a wider mandate, including destroying "objects that pose a threat", Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said on Wednesday.
The NATO air policing mission in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — three Baltic countries close to Russia that do not operate their own fighter jets — was launched in 2004, immediately after they joined the NATO alliance.
The aircraft identify and escort Russian military planes flying near the three states. This year, they have shot down suspected stray Ukrainian drones over Estonia and Latvia, events that NATO said constituted the first time the mission had opened fire in defence of the alliance.
"(The current) air policing mission is meant for peacetime, when fighters react to incidents by escorting. This way, we show that we take note of the incidents. It's a kind of deterrence", Nauseda told reporters in Ankara.
"But what is happening today is not a totally peaceful environment."
The upgraded mission will have "greater flexibility and faster response to air threats", Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna posted on X.
Currently, the Baltic Air Policing jets are scrambled to meet and identify every Russian military plane flying over international waters adjacent to the three Baltic states, from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad into the Gulf of Finland, as far as the border of Russia proper.
The mission was expanded in 2014, after Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, and includes over a dozen fighters from up to three rotating NATO allies, flying from two airfields in the region.
Last year, the jets took off in response to Russia sending a Su-35 fighter jet to escort a shadow oil fleet tanker, after Estonia attempted to detain it. They did not engage with the Su-35.
(Reporting by Andrius Sytas; editing by Louise Rasmussen, Essi Lehto and Kevin Liffey)
