A tiny team of Ukrainian drone pilots repeatedly shut down a major NATO exercise by “destroying” so many troops and combat vehicles that further training became pointless, a Thursday statement by the contributing unit 1st Corps said. The Sweden-run exercise, called Aurora 2026 ran from April 27 to May 13, 2026. The major NATO training event taking place largely in southern and central Sweden and in the Baltic Sea, the exercise mobilized a reported total 18,000 troops in land, sea and air forces from thirteen countries.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. The main event of the training was a force-on-force defense of the Swedish island Gotland in the western Baltic against a simulated Russian hybrid war attack, but the wide-reaching exercises also practiced defense of Stockholm’s sea reaches from naval raids, joint ground and air operations, and emergency movement of troops and material to a threatened region. A pair of Ukrainian drone teams acted as adversaries as part of the notional Russian force “attacking” Gotland. “The scenario is about, we have on the Eastern side of the NATO border, like Finland and the Baltic states, we have a massive buildup of enemy units, a concentration of units on that side, and we also have, within Sweden, and within other allied nations, we have hybrid activities. It’s an increased level of hybrid activities like sabotage, cyber attacks, influence operations, things like that,” said Rear Admiral Jonas Wikstrom, the Swedish exercise director, in comments published by Supinye Novyni on Thursday.