Denmark’s foreign minister announced on Tuesday that he had summoned Russia’s ambassador after Denmark’s military said a Russian frigate fired two flares at a Danish air force helicopter the previous day. One flare passed close to the helicopter, the Danish military said in a statement.
The incident came as tensions between Russia and NATO countries in Europe were running high over a string of airspace incursions by Russian jets and drones, as well as sabotage plots and attacks that European officials have blamed Russia for.
European leaders have accused Russia of trying to provoke and destabilize countries supporting Ukraine as the war there grinds toward another bloody winter, over four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The military said in its statement that the flares flew as a Danish air force helicopter was conducting “routine photographic coverage of a Russian frigate” in international waters off the coast of southern Denmark.
“This is completely unacceptable,” Lars Lokke Rasmussen, Denmark’s foreign minister, said in a statement that the Foreign Ministry released on social media.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark called the move “reckless action” by Russia.
“Russian actions are meant to intimidate and divide,” she said in a statement her office shared on social media. “They will not succeed. We will not waver.”
Vladimir Barbin, the Russian ambassador to Denmark, said in a statement that Russia would “thoroughly investigate all the circumstances of the incident” even as he accused the Danish military of regularly carrying out “dangerous maneuvers” near Russian warships.
The incident came a day after a Russian strike on a Ukrainian train station near the Polish border where David Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director, was traveling on a train. Another train had just left the station with the former British prime minister Boris Johnson and other European politicians and diplomats.
Countries neighboring Russia and Ukraine have also been plagued in recent months by drone incursions as the war in Ukraine spills over their borders.
On Tuesday, President Gitanas Nauseda of Lithuania said that NATO fighter jets had destroyed a drone that entered Lithuanian airspace overnight. He thanked allies for their response.
“With Russia intensifying its aggression against Ukraine, such readiness is vital for our region,” he said on social media, although he did not say what country the drone belonged to.
On Monday, Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, the Polish defense minister, said on social media that the Polish military had recovered a drone from the Baltic Sea and that early indications suggested that it had come from Russia.
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