Ukrainian drone pilots, deployed to Sweden as instructors this week, delivered a stark demonstration of drone warfare’s lethality when they annihilated Swedish troops acting in a defensive role during a major NATO exercise on the strategic Baltic island of Gotland.
“They stopped the training three times” for troops to adjust their tactics, but had the engagement been real, “they would have been dead,” a 24-year-old Ukrainian drone pilot told the Associated Press, speaking under the call sign Tarik in accordance with Ukrainian military regulations.
The drill unfolded under the eye of Rear Adm. Jonas Wikström, the exercise director, who told the AP that the scenario — an unnamed adversary building up forces along NATO’s eastern border while sabotage disables power and food supplies on Gotland — “could happen tomorrow.”
The exercise, which the AP was permitted to witness, involved U.S. forces alongside Swedish troops and was designed to test NATO members’ responses before the alliance’s collective defense clause, Article 5, is invoked. It played out against a backdrop of months of Russian sabotage operations across Europe, including cyberattacks against critical infrastructure and disinformation campaigns, documented in a recent AP investigation.
Sweden’s chief of defense, Gen. Michael Claesson, underscored the island’s strategic value. Gotland sits in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, where Moscow has stationed missiles. “If you control Gotland, you pretty much control the central part of the Baltic Sea,” Claesson said.
The Baltic Sea is a vital corridor for Russia’s “shadow fleet” of vessels carrying oil and liquefied natural gas used to fund the war in Ukraine.
Claesson outlined what he described as a “very reasonable scenario”: that Russian President Vladimir Putin could attempt to seize a thin sliver of NATO territory on Gotland to test whether the alliance would respond collectively.
Facing this threat, Sweden’s military is grappling not only with Russian posturing but with uncertainty over the reliability of NATO’s most powerful member. Gen. Claesson acknowledged that announcements by U.S. President Donald Trump of troop reductions in Europe have been interpreted broadly as “the Americans are leaving — and they are not.” But he said “any change in the American presence” alters the alliance’s overall military dynamics.
Trump, who has described NATO as a “paper tiger,” has ordered the withdrawal of at least 5,000 American troops from Germany and has threatened additional pullbacks. Washington has also redirected air defense systems and missiles toward the Middle East for the Iran war, prompting European concerns about gaps in continental protection, and notified some European nations that their orders of U.S. weapons will face delays.
Against that backdrop, a group of Nordic and Baltic nations, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands announced plans for a “hybrid navy” — an initiative Gen. Claesson said was not a hedge against a possible future without U.S. support, but rather an arrangement where “everything that offers European allies freedom of action is good.” Separately, the United Kingdom and Norway disclosed plans to build a combined frigate fleet, according to Marte Gerhardsen, state secretary at the Norwegian Ministry of Defense.
On the ground, the Ukrainian drone pilots who dismantled the Swedish force said their Western counterparts have potential but must improve both their drone and counter-drone tactics, and that commanders need a deeper grasp of how drone warfare reshapes the battlespace.
“You need to see this with your own eyes,” said a pilot using the call sign Karat, who described flying small first-person-view attack drones on the front line against Russian forces, sometimes operating with reconnaissance drone support and sometimes “working blindly.”
Brig. Gen. Curtis King, with the U.S. military, said Western nations must focus on “deep” detection capabilities to spot drones at long range and integrate radar systems built by different companies and countries so they can share data and track threats together. That integration has begun, King said, but “we’re not there yet.”
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Sweden has reversed its post-Cold War drawdown and rebuilt its military presence on Gotland, and Sweden joined NATO alongside Finland in 2024. The exercise underscored how rapidly drone warfare is reshaping those defenses — and how urgently NATO is seeking to learn from the Ukrainians who are fighting it every day.