Russian frigate fires flares at a Danish helicopter off Gedser

A Russian frigate fired two emergency flares at a Royal Danish Air Force Fennec helicopter on Monday evening while the helicopter was photographing the ship in international waters off Gedser, at the southern tip of Falster. The Danish Defence Command said one flare passed close to the aircraft. The crew was unharmed.

The Fennec, a light observation helicopter based at Karup in Jutland, was on what the command called routine photographic coverage of the warship. Flares at sea are normally a warning or distress signal. Peter Viggo Jakobsen of the Royal Danish Defence College read the shots as a demand to stop photographing and to keep distance: a show of force dressed as a signal.

Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called the episode “completely unacceptable” and said it could have endangered lives. “Russia is gradually moving the line for what it considers acceptable behaviour,” he said. He summoned ambassador Vladimir Barbin. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the action reckless and said it was meant “to intimidate and divide.” “They will not succeed. We will not waver.”

A pattern, not a surprise

Frederiksen said she was not surprised. She described “an increasingly aggressive and assertive Russia, which has intensified its hybrid war against Europe and is testing and challenging NATO.” Defence minister Jeppe Bruus later called the seamanship unprofessional and said Russia’s tolerance for risk had shifted.

Barbin said Russia would “thoroughly investigate all the circumstances” and accused Danish aircraft of regular “dangerous manoeuvres” near Russian ships. The embassy did not immediately add a public comment outside office hours. The Defence Command did not name the frigate or give a precise position beyond the waters off Gedser, on the approaches to the Danish straits that carry Baltic traffic in and out of the North Sea.

The incident landed on the same night that NATO jets destroyed a drone over Lithuania after it crossed from Belarus. Mark Rutte had warned that strikes close to alliance territory would increase NATO support for Ukraine. Denmark sits on a different flank of the same argument: the Baltic is a working sea lane, and photographing foreign warships in international waters is a standard NATO task.

What a flare is for

A flare is not a missile. It is still a pyrotechnic fired at an aircraft a few hundred feet off the water. Close passage is the point. Jakobsen’s reading matches how similar encounters have been used in the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean: raise the cost of surveillance without crossing into an act that would force an immediate military reply.

Rasmussen framed the Danish answer as the opposite of retreat. Denmark, he said, is working to keep shipping able to pass peacefully through Danish waters. The ambassador has been called in. The helicopter returned. The frigate was not identified in the first Danish statement, which leaves the next move with Moscow’s investigation and with whatever the alliance chooses to say once the Lithuanian wreckage and the Baltic flares sit on the same desk.