The United States has strongly condemned Russia after Moscow's UN ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, warned that "Nato membership will not protect" Baltic states from retaliation if Ukraine launches drones against Russia from their territory. US ambassador Tammy Bruce told the Security Council that "there is no place for threats against a council member," reaffirming that Washington would honour all its Nato commitments. The confrontation came hours after a Romanian F-16, operating as part of Nato's Baltic air-policing mission, shot down a stray Ukrainian drone over Estonia (a small Baltic state and Nato member bordering Russia), which Kyiv attributed to Russian electronic jamming that had pushed the drone off course. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia all denied Russian allegations that their territory was being used to launch Ukrainian drone attacks, with Latvia's president calling the claims outright lies, while the EU's UN representative condemned Moscow's threats as a "head-spinning distortion of reality."