Did Euronews report that a "Ukrainian gunman" shot and killed three NATO soldiers during the August 2026 military drill held in Latvia? No, that's not true: There is no such report on the news organization's website nor its social media accounts. Also, the Latvian army issued a statement explicitly denying this.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here and here) on X by @ROYALMRBADNEWS on Aug. 13, 2026. It opened:
BREAKING: Four dead after a shooting at NATO's Baltic Trust 26 exercise in Latvia. The Ukrainian gunman reportedly opened fire on NATO servicemen, killing three before taking his own life.
This is what a screenshot of the video shared in the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @ROYALMRBADNEWS on X.)
NATO's Baltic Trust 26 exercise (archived here) did take place in Riga, Latvia, between Aug. 3 and Aug. 14, 2026 (archived here), but neither the event described in the claim nor the supposed Euronews report was real.
Euronews is a pan-European television network headquartered in Lyon, France. Lead Stories used Google to search for articles published on Euronews' website during the military exercise. We used keywords "Latvia AND NATO" (archived here) and then "Three NATO troops killed by Ukrainian soldier at Latvia military drill" here (archived here). Neither search showed the supposed report. Lead Stories also manually reviewed Euronews accounts on X (archived here) and Facebook, but found no entries confirming the report's existence.
(Image source: X.)
(Image source: Facebook.)
A search across Google News for the keywords "Three NATO troops killed by Ukrainian soldier at Latvia military drill" (archived here) didn't return credible journalistic articles about the alleged shooting.
Finally, the Latvian army has explicitly denied the claim. An Aug. 14, 2026, post (archived here) on its official account, read in part, as automatically translated by Chrome to English:
... such an incident has not occurred and the exercises are taking place without incident.
