Russia Spent 18 Months Flying Drones Over NATO's Bases. Europe's Answer Is €325 Million.

A new IISS report maps a covert, sea-launched drone campaign against Europe's rear. Brussels answered the same week with a five-project "drone wall" a fraction of the size of the problem it describes.

For a year and a half, small drones appeared over Ramstein Air Base, Belgium's Kleine Brogel, and the runways of Copenhagen airport, and no European government would say out loud who sent them. On July 2 the International Institute for Strategic Studies said it for them. In a 37-page report shared before publication with the Associated Press, the London think tank assessed that it is "highly likely" the Kremlin ran a coordinated drone campaign over Europe between August 2024 and February 2026, launched in part from the sanctions-dodging oil tankers of Russia's shadow fleet.

The IISS plotted 144 suspected drone sightings across 13 countries, all of them NATO members except Ireland. Of those incursions, the report puts 48 percent over military installations, 26 percent over critical infrastructure such as ports and energy sites, and 18 percent near civilian airports. Germany logged the most at 58, followed by Belgium at 25, Denmark at 16, the Netherlands at nine, France at eight, and the United Kingdom and Norway at seven each. The think tank argues that a spread on that scale is hard to explain as misidentification or hobbyist activity.

The 144 sightings, and the ships nearby

The report's method was correlation, not capture. Researchers overlaid the drone sightings with the tracks of vessels known or suspected to belong to Russia's shadow fleet, the uncertain-ownership tankers that move Russian oil around Western sanctions, and found the two lined up. It named specific ships: the Arctica, the Boracay, and an intelligence vessel, the Zhigulevsk. As the Arctica sailed the Danish coast on January 3, 2025, the report said, up to 20 drones flew over the port of Koege before turning back out to sea. When Copenhagen airport shut down on September 22, 2025, the Arctica and the Boracay were both in the area. France boarded the Boracay at the end of that month, and President Emmanuel Macron said afterward he could not rule out that the ship was involved.

The most pointed episode came in February 2026, when, per the IISS, a drone launched from the Zhigulevsk approached the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle before it was neutralized by electronic jamming. The IISS does not claim any single sighting is proven; its case rests on the correlation across the full set.

What the report cannot prove

The report presents no physical evidence tying any drone to any ship. No launch was observed, no command link was intercepted, and no wreckage, telemetry, or credible video has been released, the IISS acknowledges. None of the affected governments has formally accused Russia. Critics noted that the study revives a theory that has circulated for a year without producing the forensic link that would settle it, and the IISS itself concedes that attributing any given flight to a single actor is close to impossible.

The missing proof is consistent with how such a campaign would be designed to work. A drone launched from a nominally commercial tanker, then recovered by no one, is built for deniability as much as for reconnaissance. Eighteen months of flights over Ramstein and Kleine Brogel would map where NATO's sensors reach and how quickly a response comes, and the deniability is what lets the same flight be flown again. Unlike a cruise missile, an offshore-launched drone leaves no clear return address, which raises the bar for any government weighing a response.

The same cost math as Ukraine's front

The pattern the IISS describes, cheap drones flown in volume to map air defenses and force costly responses, is the war being fought in Ukraine since 2022. The same cost arithmetic now sits off Europe's coastline. A reconnaissance drone can cost a few thousand dollars or less, while a Patriot or IRIS-T interceptor runs past a million dollars a shot, a ratio that makes shooting one down a losing exchange for the defender.

Russia needed no technological breakthrough to run the campaign. It relied on a tanker fleet it already operates and on drones available commercially, and it exploited a gap Ukraine closed years earlier at its own front: air defense that was not watching the low, slow, and inexpensive end of the sky over the rear.

Brussels' five projects and €325 million

Brussels moved the same week, which suggests the report did not surprise the Commission either. On July 3 the European Commission proposed five cross-border defence projects, and two speak directly to the drone problem. The first, named DECODER, for Drone and Counter Drone European Resolve, groups 26 EU states plus Norway and Ukraine to develop unmanned and counter-unmanned systems jointly. The second, Eastern Flank Watch, adds a surveillance layer along the bloc's eastern edge with 13 states, Norway, and Ukraine. The other three cover maritime and seabed defense, air and missile early warning, and space.

The funding is modest against the stated need. Under the €1.5 billion European Defence Industry Programme, the Commission set aside €325 million ($372 million) for all five projects combined, with grants capped near €20 million each. The DECODER participants' own proposal estimates the drone effort will require €3.5 billion to €5 billion by 2033, so the seed grant amounts to roughly a tenth of the low end of their own figure, and it is spread across the maritime, air-defense, and space projects as well.

European counter-drone makers are already scaling ahead of the grants. Munich's Tytan Technologies is opening a German factory to build up to 3,000 AI-guided interceptors a month, with production slated to start in August, per Defense News. Alpine Eagle, founded in Munich in 2023, has paired with Latvia's Origin Robotics on a layered detect-and-intercept system, according to DroneLife. Radar maker Echodyne has described the counter-drone market as red hot, and Helsing, the German software firm valued at a reported $18 billion, handed its HX-2 strike drone to US soldiers at a NATO exercise in Lithuania in June, Axios reported. Money is not the shortfall: European defense-tech funding has run at record levels this year, with Munich's Quantum Systems closing a $1.2 billion round on July 2. What the counter-drone effort has lacked is a buyer organized at the scale of the threat.

Twenty-seven national air pictures

The Commission built the EDPCI framework around one stated purpose, reducing "market fragmentation." Europe's air defense runs on national systems and national sensors that do not share a common track picture, and a drone crossing from Danish into German into Belgian airspace exploits exactly that seam. Merging 27 national air pictures into a single defensive line is a governance problem that a coordination framework and €325 million do not resolve on their own.

Europe's procurement institutions were built to buy small numbers of exquisite platforms over years, not inexpensive systems in volume at speed, and DECODER is a multi-year, multi-nation program aimed at a threat that costs a few thousand dollars per airframe. Ukraine's three years of drone warfare point to the conclusion its own officials repeat: mass is met with mass, produced quickly and near where it is used. Whether a cross-border EU framework can move at that tempo is the open question the €325 million does not settle.

What to watch

Three markers will show whether the response has money and speed behind it. First, whether the projects clear Council approval and whether the €3.5-to-5-billion sum the DECODER partners project materializes beyond the seed grant. Second, whether Tytan's August production start and the wider counter-drone buildout put interceptors on the eastern flank rather than leaving orders on a backlog. Third, whether any affected government moves from the IISS's careful "highly likely" to a formal attribution, the step that would let NATO treat sea-launched drones as a coordinated campaign rather than a run of unexplained sightings.