Denmark says it is not seeking NATO Article 4 consultations over drones

By Soren Jeppesen and Louise Rasmussen

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) -Denmark has no plans to invoke NATO's Article 4 clause on security consultations, its foreign minister said on Friday, after drone incursions shut down air traffic in various parts of the country several times this week.

Copenhagen Airport, the Nordic region's busiest, closed for several hours late on Monday as several large drones were seen in its airspace. Five smaller airports, both civilian and military, were also shut temporarily in the following days.

Article 4 of the NATO treaty states that members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territory, political independence or security of any of them is threatened.

Denmark initially said it had not decided whether to invoke the clause. It had rarely been activated since NATO's founding in 1949 until this month, when Poland and Estonia each invoked it due to incursions, respectively, by drones and Russian fighter jets.

"Article 4 has been activated nine times in NATO's entire history, and twice recently in relation to Poland and Estonia, so we have no reason to do so," Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told reporters.

Latvia's foreign minister said on Thursday that Denmark had told its NATO allies that "state actors" were responsible for the drones, but Lokke on Friday rejected this assertion, calling the claim that Denmark had said so a misunderstanding.

"We are not in the situation today where we can attribute what we have seen to anyone in particular," Lokke said.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on Tuesday the drone activity was a form of hybrid attack and linked it to Russia. Moscow denies being behind the drone incursions.

Highlighting Danes' growing anxiety about drones, the country's second-biggest airport, Billund, was briefly shut early on Friday following a report of illegal drone activity that police later identified as "a shining star in the sky".

(Reporting by Soren Jeppesen and Louise Breusch Rasmussen, editing by Terje Solsvik and Gareth Jones)