Drones and balloons cause wave of panic in Nato countries
- mrisak7
- Oct 6
- 5 min read
Oliver Moody / Berlin
Bruno Waterfield / Brussels
Sunday October 05 2025, 8.00pm BST, The Times
In the latest incidents, Vilnius and Munich airports closed. Denmark and Poland had suspected incursions by Russia too — but are they mistakes or provocations?
At Munich airport, staff spent two nights laying out hundreds of camp beds and air mattresses for passengers whose bank holiday flights had been cancelled.
More than 700 miles away to the northeast, hundreds of people were grounded at Vilnius airport in Lithuania after more than a dozen meteorological-type balloons from Belarus were identified in its airspace.
Off the coast of Saint-Nazaire in the Loire estuary, the French authorities were obliged to release a mysterious oil tanker variously known as the Pushpa or the Boracay, which was travelling from the Russian Baltic port of Primorsk to the Suez Canal. It had previously been spotted in the vicinity of a spate of drone incursions over airports and military bases across Denmark.
Johannes Simon/Getty Images
The three incidents are among the most recent manifestations of an amorphous wave of disruption that has rippled across the skies of northern Europe in the past month.
Since at least 20 Russian drones violated Polish territory on the night of September 9, the alerts have come almost daily, affecting at least ten airports and 12 military facilities in even Nato countries — and these are only the high-profile cases that have been made known to the public.
This is the sharp end of a much larger and older phenomenon. As drones have become cheaper and more ubiquitous, they are increasingly straying into places where they should not be.
Dedrone, an American counter-drone technology company with customers that include prisons, government offices, power plants and 50 airports, has detected more than a million airspace violations around the world this year.
Michaela Stache / AFP / Getty Images
While the vast majority of these involve hobby-type drones from the dominant Chinese manufacturer DJI, it has also experienced a 430 per cent increase in the use of DIY drones that are harder for many ordinary radio surveillance systems to track. It is only now that the scale and seriousness of the problem are coming fully into the public eye.
Over the weekend, the German civil aviation authority, the DFS, disclosed that drones had disrupted flights at the country’s airports 172 times since January 1, including 37 incidents at Frankfurt, 13 at Cologne-Bonn and six at Berlin-Brandenburg airport.
It also emerged that there had been suspicious drone flights over three military bases in northeastern Germany and another case a fortnight ago when a swarm of drones orbiting a “mothership” had flown over a naval shipyard, a power plant and the regional parliament building in the northern port city of Kiel.
Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said on Sunday he assumed “that Russia is behind most of these drone flights”, adding that the frequency of incursions was reaching unprecedented levels, even when compared with the Cold War.
It is often difficult, however, to ascertain swiftly which of these incidents might be the work of Russia or other states and which are simply blunders or provocations, such as a case last Friday when a German man was arrested near Frankfurt airport. He claimed he had simply wanted to try out his new drone.
Stephane Mahe / Reuters
Phil Miles, a former UK defence ministry official who works on risk consultancy for Kroll, a financial firm, said hostile states would often sub-contract malign drone operations to local criminals, lending them a veneer of plausible deniability. “As the technology evolves, there will be more and more of these types of events that are hard to counter and attribute,” he said.
“Some of this activity might just be an enthusiast who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But if you’re Russia, for example, that doesn’t mean you automatically go to Russian nationals [for this sort of job]. You’re basically contracting this out to the lowest bidder on the internet. You’ll probably never meet these people.”
Another former defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia and China had already developed sophisticated methods for exploiting the weaknesses of western drone security, such as the thresholds for criminal prosecution and muddled jurisdiction between agencies.
In some of these cases the authorities may be deliberately holding back from a full response so as not to “show the cards” they would use in a more serious incident, the expert said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re sometimes surprised that countries just let these things go.”
Ash Alexander-Cooper, a British Army veteran and former counterterrorism official who is Dedrone’s vice-president for the Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific regions, said that in practice virtually all of the drones could be detected and neutralised with relatively inexpensive and commercially available technology.
He said most airports had an exclusion zone with a radius of five to ten kilometres, within which drones could be identified through their radio emissions or other devices such as radars and cameras.
“There’s a misunderstanding that if you jam or neutralise a drone it’s just going to fall out of the sky,” Alexander-Cooper said. “[In fact] drones will generally hover for a little bit trying to see if they can reconnect with the pilot. And if they can’t, then they will go ‘home’, back to the pilot. That’s great news for us if we get the data that shows where the pilot is and where the drone took off from.”
The case of the oil tanker, which came under investigation as a possible launch site for some of the drones that had flown over airports and military bases in Denmark, demonstrates how the issue intersects with another dimension of Russian hybrid warfare: the “shadow fleet”.
Depending on which definition is used, this consists of anything from 600 to 1,000 tankers and cargo ships that visit Russia’s Baltic ports but typically sail under flags of convenience from other countries, such as Panama, Liberia and the Cook Islands.
As well as evading western oil sanctions on Russia, some of these ships are suspected to be monitoring and sabotaging offshore infrastructure, including gas pipelines and data and electricity cables.
Holding them to account has proved tricky. On Friday, Finnish prosecutors lost an important test case when a court in Helsinki ruled that it had no jurisdiction over the Eagle S, a Cook Islands-flagged tanker alleged to have deliberately dragged its anchor over six underwater cables.
An Estonian military intelligence report published over the weekend noted, however, that states have the right under international maritime law to stop and board a ship on the high seas if they have a “reasonable” suspicion that it does not have a valid national flag.
At least 16 of the shadow fleet ships are thought to be flagless and others, such as the Pushpa, or Boracay, change their flags with suspicious frequency.
Stephane Mahe / Reuters
Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, has urged his European allies to be more creative in finding legal mechanisms to clamp down on the fleet. “We need to act legally and materially before we have a huge environmental disaster,” he said this year. We have a clear and present danger to this very fragile ecosystem [and] we need legal changes to the law of the sea.”
However, a source in the German military said Berlin was reluctant to push legal boundaries in dealing with the shadow fleet because of the danger that China would retaliate with similar means in the Indo-Pacific.
