Evening Brief, Friday 14 August

NATO fighter jets shot down a drone over eastern Latvia early on Friday after it entered airspace near Balvi, close to the Russian border. Latvia said four allied aircraft scrambled, two Italian Eurofighters and two Turkish F-16s, and one Italian jet destroyed the unmanned aircraft. Riga attributed the incursion to Russian electronic warfare, while NATO opened an investigation and did not identify the drone's origin. That caveat matters because Ukrainian forces reportedly struck targets in northwestern Russia overnight, and electronic jamming can push drones off course.

Latvia issued an orange alert for five border regions before lifting it after the shootdown. Finland also restricted aviation and maritime traffic in the eastern Gulf of Finland, then lifted the measures after saying no drones had entered Finnish territory. Russia's Leningrad region, which includes St Petersburg and borders NATO territory, reported that air defences had downed drones overnight; officials gave figures ranging from 15 to 51. A fire also broke out at Ust-Luga, a Baltic port that handles Russian oil cargoes.

The incident follows recent drone entries over Latvia, Romania and other eastern NATO states, some linked by local authorities to Russian systems and others still disputed. NATO allies discussed the pattern this week and said Russia bears responsibility for dangerous airspace violations, while Moscow has denied hostile intent in similar episodes. Castles rarely decide modern wars; stray drones over Baltic forests may decide how much risk NATO can absorb before routine policing starts to look like escalation.

France's heatwave reached its 17th day on August 13, overtaking the 16-day episodes of 2003 and July 2026 and becoming the country's third-longest recorded heatwave. Météo-France put the provisional national thermal indicator at 28.8C, while at least 117 monthly temperature records fell by late afternoon. The hottest readings hit 42.5C at Châteaumeillant and Le Pallet, and 75 departments remained under orange heat alerts on Friday morning.

The heat fed fires across Europe. In Croatia, a wildfire near Omiš killed one person, injured at least 40 and forced between 1,200 and 2,000 people to evacuate from a coastal area packed with summer tourists. France evacuated more than 500 people in the Landes, Britain recorded its hottest day of 2026 at 38.1C, and the UK Health Security Agency linked the first two heatwaves of the season to 2,877 deaths.

Croatian fire chief Slavko Tucakovic described a night in which wind drove flames through pine forest and towns.

Governments are still treating heat as a seasonal nuisance, but the damage now moves through hospitals, holiday routes, forests and water networks at the same time. The summer is no longer just hot; it has become a stress test for the ordinary machinery of European life.

Romania began a controlled shutdown of Unit 2 at the Cernavoda nuclear plant after the Danube fell too low to supply cooling water, leaving both of the country's 706MW reactors offline. The plant usually generates about a fifth of Romania's electricity, and the government has asked consumers to cut evening demand while activating lignite generation, using reservoirs and preparing staged curbs for industrial users if necessary. Dacia and Ford suspended production in Romania until August 19 to ease the strain.

The same dry spell has pushed Hungary's Paks nuclear plant close to forced shutdown and cut output sharply earlier this month. On the Rhine, the gauge at Kaub, the bottleneck between Koblenz and Mainz, fell to 8cm on Friday morning, the lowest since records began in 1880. Germany's inland-shipping association warned that single-digit readings make continuous commercial navigation uneconomic, and firms along the river have shifted cargo to trucks despite driver shortages and higher costs.

The economic logic is awkward. Europe built thermal power plants and heavy industry around rivers that once looked dependable, then built supply chains assuming those rivers would carry fuel, chemicals and grain. Low water now attacks both assumptions at once, so drought has moved from the weather map into the balance sheet.

France's Constitutional Council struck down the planned ban on social media access for children under 15, ruling that Parliament had written the measure too broadly and had failed to protect freedom of expression, communication and privacy. The law would have covered TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, X, messaging services, online games and social features on video platforms from September 1. Judges objected that every user, including adults, would have had to prove their age without clear safeguards, and that the rule treated a 14-year-old and a young child alike. The ban on mobile phones in high schools survived.

On the same day, the court cleared France's assisted-dying law, which allows eligible adults who suffer unbearably from grave and incurable conditions in a terminal or advanced phase to request help to die. The Council added three reservations: private clinics may refuse procedures that clash with their mission if local care remains available, pharmacists receive conscience protections, and doctors must consider guardians' observations for protected adults. President Emmanuel Macron hailed the ruling and turned immediately to implementation.

The pair of rulings gives Emmanuel Macron both a win and a warning. France can legalise one of the most intimate choices in public life, but it cannot protect children online by waving away adult privacy and teenage speech. The court has told the state to use a scalpel, not a blanket.