Author: Ilona Bērziņa/Opinion piece
If it is true that the Russian Shahed drone was being monitored during its entire flight through Latvian air space up until it’s crash in half past nine in the morning, then why didn’t army men arrive in Gaigalava Parish immediately to investigate the crash site? If Latvian National Armed Forces (NBS) were following the drone’s flight route, why was the drone sighting reported to the police by a local resident a 9:57 am? Why did NBS Commander Leonīds Kalniņš inform President Edgars Rinkēvičs about the incident only around the afternoon? These aren’t the only questions.
I would not like to think that if the high-ranking officials, regardless of their goals, have lied, the National Security Council will cover them, so that such obscenity does not leave the house. In addition, nowhere has it been called out that NATO, if there really was a lie, naively believes all those stories that are spun by Mr. Sprūds to so diligently feed to the public.
We all experienced a shock when a Russian explosives-filled drone passed 100 km into our air space and NBS didn’t even twitch. Now the shock is even bigger – according to reports from LTV programme De facto, the Latvian army never noticed the drone at all. On top of that, Minister of Defence and NBS Commander Leonīds Kalniņš may have shamelessly lied to the people at a press-conference organised after news hit the fan. The only way to save face and good name in such a situation is standing down from their respective posts. If the high-ranking officials are unable to pull themselves together, we have the president and prime minister, whose duty it is to order them to step down. The situation when the Ministry of Defence and the NBS are led by people who are under the shadow of very serious suspicions about lying on a matter related to national security is unacceptable. We should hope Prime Minister Evika Siliņa understands this.
Politicians tend to lie. Too often lies costs these people their high posts. Nevertheless, I believe Sprūds and Kalniņš will fight tooth and nail to defend their truth – that they really were monitoring the situation with the Russian drone from the first second it had entered Latvian air space and they were acting in accordance with NBS procedures and that’s that.
A decade ago, Glen Newey (1961-2017), a political scientist at the University of Strathfield in Britain, pointed out in a study on the lies of politicians that the problem is that politicians who lie tend to lie very well. The author wrote with irony that voters that ask too many questions are to blame. Looking at it from this perspective, Glen Newey’s study has not lost its relevance. I fear it will remain relevant for a long time. So it should not come as a big surprise that, when asked by De Facto: “Who decided to lie?”, the minister responded by saying: “Wait, what are we talking about?”
It is entirely possible that in the month that has passed since the incident with the drone, the minister of defence and high-ranking army officials have noticed that nothing special has happened. So what if one Russian explosives-filled drone wandered into our country – nothing bad happened! This incident will have severe consequences for public trust.
Ministers have a tendency to be replaced. The bigger issue here is the trust in the country’s armed forces.
While last year 72% of Latvian residents trusted NBS, this year’s number show only 66% (data from Rait Custom Research Baltic). I don’t want this trust to go lower because of the drone incident.
The question asked by De Facto – who decided to lie? – is the most important question in the entire drone saga. Because this man, no matter what his accomplishments or how progressive the party is, must step down immediately. If the public could still “swallow” the fact that the soldiers had somehow not seen the Russian drone, then lying about such a serious issue as safety is unforgivable.
There is another interesting idea mentioned in the aforementioned study by Glen Newey: “When journalists or parliamentary commissions start investigating areas that governments want to keep secret, it is likely that they will be pushed more and more towards lies.” The good news is the majority of them get caught and the whole thing usually ends in shame.
If you type “politician resigns for lying” in Google search, you will find there are many such cases. Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs Halbe Zijlstra resigned a few years ago because he had lied during his 2017 election campaign that he had met with Putin in 2006. In Singapore parliamentarian deputy Khan resigned in 2021 after lying that she had escorted a woman who had been raped to a police station several years prior. US Congressman Jeff Fortenberry was forced to resign after lying about the sources of funding for his campaign. The list goes on. Local politicians who were forced to resign include Latvian Minister of Health Guntis Belēvičs and Minister of Environment Protection and Regional Development Juris Pūce. Although both ministers had admitted to lying, it did not happen immediately after the truth about them was published.
It is possible Latvian PM Siliņa might demonstrate the belief that black is white and so on in the name of coalition stability. The next Saeima elections are still far away for parties to hope people “forgive and forget” and return to their usual approach to elections, which can be described with the words – “well, who else are we supposed to vote for?”
Putting together all the publicly available information about the drone epic, the version about lies becomes all the more likely. This is why the whole story concerning the minister’s “shock” over the construction of militarized monument near Ādaži base looks more like to an attempt to distract residents and direct their anger in a different direction. It is obvious that the direction of taxpayers’ money towards the government’s airBaltic and Rail Baltica projects remains a painful topic for residents. So it is better to have people shout and be angry at the improperly spent budget funds instead of some drone that crashed and burned “a long time ago”. What I would like to know is how did it happen that Andris Sprūds, who has been in charge of the defence sector for slightly more than a year, managed to spot this “questionable military art installation” only after the storm clouds of the drone scandal started hanging over his head.